Ecology Letters

doi: 10.1111/ele.14250pmid: N/A

Couée, Ivan

doi: 10.1111/ele.14410pmid: 38519453

Local minority languages and dialects, through the local knowledge and expertise associated with them, can play major roles in analysing climate change and biodiversity loss, in facilitating community awareness of environmental crises and in setting up locally‐adapted resilience and sustainability strategies. While the situation and contribution of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples are of emblematic importance, the issue of the relationships between cultural and linguistic diversity and environmental awareness and protection does not solely concern peripheral highly‐specialized communities in specific ecosystems of the Global South, but constitutes a worldwide challenge, throughout all of the countries, whatever their geographical location, their economical development, or their political status. Environmental emergency and climate change resilience should therefore raise international awareness on the need to promote the survival and development of minority languages and dialects and to take into account their creativity and expertise in relation to the dynamics of their local environments.

Scheifes, Daniil J. P.; Beest, Mariska; Olde Venterink, Harry; Jansen, André; Kinsbergen, Daan T. P.; Wassen, Martin J.

doi: 10.1111/ele.14402pmid: 38511333

Plant species occupy distinct niches along a nitrogen‐to‐phosphorus (N:P) gradient, yet there is no general framework for belowground nutrient acquisition traits in relation to N or P limitation. We retrieved several belowground traits from databases, placed them in the “root economics space” framework, and linked these to a dataset of 991 plots in Eurasian herbaceous plant communities, containing plant species composition, aboveground community biomass and tissue N and P concentrations. Our results support that under increasing N:P ratio, belowground nutrient acquisition strategies shift from “fast” to “slow” and from “do‐it‐yourself” to “outsourcing”, with alternative “do‐it‐yourself” to “outsourcing” strategies at both ends of the spectrum. Species' mycorrhizal capacity patterns conflicted with root economics space predictions based on root diameter, suggesting evolutionary development of alternative strategies under P limitation. Further insight into belowground strategies along nutrient stoichiometry is crucial for understanding the high abundance of threatened plant species under P limitation.

Gajewski, Zachary; McElmurray, Philip; Wojdak, Jeremy; McGregor, Cari; Zeller, Lily; Cooper, Hannah; Belden, Lisa K.; Hopkins, Skylar

doi: 10.1111/ele.14385pmid: 38480959

Nonrandom foraging can cause animals to aggregate in resource dense areas, increasing host density, contact rates and pathogen transmission, but when should nonrandom foraging and resource distributions also have density‐independent effects? Here, we used a factorial experiment with constant resource and host densities to quantify host contact rates across seven resource distributions. We also used an agent‐based model to compare pathogen transmission when host movement was based on random foraging, optimal foraging or something between those states. Nonrandom foraging strongly depressed contact rates and transmission relative to the classic random movement assumptions used in most epidemiological models. Given nonrandom foraging in the agent‐based model and experiment, contact rates and transmission increased with resource aggregation and average distance to resource patches due to increased host movement in search of resources. Overall, we describe three density‐independent mechanisms by which host behaviour and resource distributions alter contact rate functions and pathogen transmission.

Sanchez, Loïc; Loiseau, Nicolas; Edgar, Graham J.; Hautecoeur, Cyril; Leprieur, Fabien; Manel, Stéphanie; McLean, Matthew; Stuart‐Smith, Rick D.; Velez, Laure; Mouillot, David

doi: 10.1111/ele.14418pmid: 38532624

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are the most widely applied tool for marine biodiversity conservation, yet many gaps remain in our understanding of their species‐specific effects, partly because the socio‐environmental context and spatial autocorrelation may blur and bias perceived conservation outcomes. Based on a large data set of nearly 3000 marine fish surveys spanning all tropical regions of the world, we build spatially explicit models for 658 fish species to estimate species‐specific responses to protection while controlling for the environmental, habitat and socio‐economic contexts experienced across their geographic ranges. We show that the species responses are highly variable, with ~40% of fishes not benefitting from protection. When investigating how traits influence species' responses, we find that rare top‐predators and small herbivores benefit the most from MPAs while mid‐trophic level species benefit to a lesser extent, and rare large herbivores experience adverse effects, indicating potential trophic cascades.

Uiterwaal, Stella F.; DeLong, John P.

doi: 10.1111/ele.14394pmid: 38511320

Functional responses describe foraging rates across prey densities and underlie many fundamental ecological processes. Most functional response knowledge comes from simplified lab experiments, but we do not know whether these experiments accurately represent foraging in nature. In addition, the difficulty of conducting multispecies functional response experiments means that it is unclear whether interaction strengths are weakened in the presence of multiple prey types. We developed a novel method to estimate wild predators' foraging rates from metabarcoding data and use this method to present functional responses for wild wolf spiders foraging on 27 prey families. These field functional responses were considerably reduced compared to lab functional responses. We further find that foraging is sometimes increased in the presence of other prey types, contrary to expectations. Our novel method for estimating field foraging rates will allow researchers to determine functional responses for wild predators and address long‐standing questions about foraging in nature.

Rillig, Matthias C.; Mansour, India; Hempel, Stefan; Bi, Mohan; König‐Ries, Birgitta; Kasirzadeh, Atoosa

doi: 10.1111/ele.14397pmid: 38430051

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) models will have broad impacts on society including the scientific enterprise; ecology and environmental science will be no exception. Here, we discuss the potential opportunities and risks of advanced generative AI for visual material (images and video) for the science of ecology and the environment itself. There are clearly opportunities for positive impacts, related to improved communication, for example; we also see possibilities for ecological research to benefit from generative AI (e.g., image gap filling, biodiversity surveys, and improved citizen science). However, there are also risks, threatening to undermine the credibility of our science, mostly related to actions of bad actors, for example in terms of spreading fake information or committing fraud. Risks need to be mitigated at the level of government regulatory measures, but we also highlight what can be done right now, including discussing issues with the next generation of ecologists and transforming towards radically open science workflows.

Cook, Alicia M.; Rezende, Enrico L.; Petrou, Katherina; Leigh, Andy

doi: 10.1111/ele.14416pmid: 38549256

Most plant thermal tolerance studies focus on single critical thresholds, which limit the capacity to generalise across studies and predict heat stress under natural conditions. In animals and microbes, thermal tolerance landscapes describe the more realistic, cumulative effects of temperature. We tested this in plants by measuring the decline in leaf photosynthetic efficiency (FV/FM) following a combination of temperatures and exposure times and then modelled these physiological indices alongside recorded environmental temperatures. We demonstrate that a general relationship between stressful temperatures and exposure durations can be effectively employed to quantify and compare heat tolerance within and across plant species and over time. Importantly, we show how FV/FM curves translate to plants under natural conditions, suggesting that environmental temperatures often impair photosynthetic function. Our findings provide more robust descriptors of heat tolerance in plants and suggest that heat tolerance in disparate groups of organisms can be studied with a single predictive framework.

Receveur, Aurore; Bonfanti, Jonathan; D'Agata, Stephanie; Helmstetter, Andrew J.; Moore, Nikki A.; Oliveira, Brunno F.; Petit‐Cailleux, Cathleen; Rievrs Borges, Erica; Schultz, Marieke; Sexton, Aaron N.; Veytia, Devi

doi: 10.1111/ele.14395

Ørsted, Michael; Willot, Quentin; Olsen, Andreas Kirk; Kongsgaard, Viktor; Overgaard, Johannes

doi: 10.1111/ele.14421pmid: 38549250

Studies of ectotherm responses to heat extremes often rely on assessing absolute critical limits for heat coma or death (CTmax), however, such single parameter metrics ignore the importance of stress exposure duration. Furthermore, population persistence may be affected at temperatures considerably below CTmax through decreased reproductive output. Here we investigate the relationship between tolerance duration and severity of heat stress across three ecologically relevant life‐history traits (productivity, coma and mortality) using the global agricultural pest Drosophila suzukii. For the first time, we show that for sublethal reproductive traits, tolerance duration decreases exponentially with increasing temperature (R2 > 0.97), thereby extending the Thermal Death Time framework recently developed for mortality and coma. Using field micro‐environmental temperatures, we show how thermal stress can lead to considerable reproductive loss at temperatures with limited heat mortality highlighting the importance of including limits to reproductive performance in ecological studies of heat stress vulnerability.