Ecology Letters (ECOL LETT)

Publications in this journal

• Article: Thermal acclimation in widespread heterotrophic soil microbes

  Thomas W Crowther and Mark A Bradford
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: Respiration by plants and microorganisms is primarily responsible for mediating carbon exchanges between the biosphere and atmosphere. Climate warming has the potential to influence the activity of these organisms, regulating exchanges between carbon pools. Physiological ‘down-regulation’ of warm-adapted species (acclimation) could ameliorate the predicted respiratory losses of soil carbon under climate change scenarios, but unlike plants and symbiotic microbes, the existence of this phenomenon in heterotrophic soil microbes remains controversial. Previous studies using complex soil microbial communities are unable to distinguish physiological acclimation from other community-scale adjustments. We explored the temperature- sensitivity of individual saprotrophic basidiomycete fungi growing in agar, showing definitively that these widespread heterotrophic fungi can acclimate to temperature. In almost all cases, the warm-acclimated individuals had lower growth and respiration rates at intermediate temperatures than cold-acclimated isolates. Inclusion of such microbial physiological responses to warming is essential to enhance the robustness of global climate-ecosystem carbon models.
  Ecology Letters 01/2013;
• Article: A Specialist Root Herbivore Exploits Defensive Metabolites to Locate Nutritious Tissues

  Robert CAM, Veyrat N, Glauser G, Marti G, Doyen G, Villard N, Gaillard MDP, Köllner TG, Giron D, Body M, Babst BA, Ferrieri RA, Turlings TCJ, Erb M
  Ecology Letters 01/2011;
• Article: Land use intensification reduces functional redundancy and response diversity in plant communities

  Etienne Laliberté, Jessie A. Wells, Fabrice DeClerck, Daniel J. Metcalfe, Carla P. Catterall, Cibele Queiroz, Isabelle Aubin, Stephen P. Bonser, Yi Ding, Jennifer M. Fraterrigo, Sean McNamara, John W. Morgan, Dalia Sánchez Merlos, Peter A. Vesk, Margaret M. Mayfield
  Ecology Letters 01/2010; 13:76-86.
• Article: A dispersal-limited sampling theory for species and alleles.

  Rampal S Etienne, David Alonso
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: The importance of dispersal for biodiversity has long been recognized. However, it was never advertised as vigorously as Stephen Hubbell did in the context of his neutral community theory. After his book appeared in 2001, several scientists have sought and found analytical expressions for the effect of dispersal limitation on community composition, still in the neutral context. This has been done along two relatively independent lines of research that have a different mathematical approach and focus on different, yet related, types of results. Here, we study both types in a new framework that makes use of the sampling nature of the theory. We present sampling distributions that contain binomial or hypergeometric sampling on the one hand, and dispersal limitation on the other, and thus views dispersal limitation as ubiquitous as sampling effects. Further, we express the results of one line of research in terms of the other and vice versa, using the concept of subsamples. A consequence of our findings is that metacommunity size does not independently affect the outcome of neutral models in contrast to a previous assertion (Ecol. Lett., 7, 2004, p. 904) based on an incorrect formula (Phys. Rev. E, 68, 2003, p. 061902, eqns 11-14). Our framework provides the basis for development of a dispersal-limited non-neutral community theory and applies in population genetics as well, where alleles and mutation play the roles of species and speciation respectively.
  Ecology Letters 11/2005; 8(11):1147-56.
• Article: Oil pollution and climate have wide-scale impacts on seabird demographics.

  Stephen C Votier, Ben J Hatchwell, Andrew Beckerman, Robin H McCleery, Fiona M Hunter, Jayne Pellatt, Mark Trinder, Tim R Birkhead
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: Oil spills often spell disaster for marine birds caught in slicks. However, the impact of oil pollution on seabird population parameters is poorly known because oil spills usually occur in wintering areas remote from breeding colonies where birds may be distributed over a wide area, and because it is difficult to separate the effects of oil pollution from the effect of natural environmental variation on seabird populations. Using a long-term data set we show that over-winter survival of adult common guillemots (Uria aalge) is negatively affected by both the incidence of four major oil-spills in their wintering grounds and high values of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index. After controlling for the effect of the NAO index, we show that winter mortality of adult guillemots is doubled by major oil pollution incidents. Our results demonstrate that oil pollution can have wide-scale impacts on marine ecosystems that can be quantified using populations of marked individuals to estimate survival.
  Ecology Letters 11/2005; 8(11):1157-64.
• Source

  Available from: cbd.int

  Article: Trends in the state of nature and their implications for human well-being.

  Andrew Balmford, William Bond
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: Two major international initiatives - the Convention on Biological Diversity's target to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment - raise the profile of ecological data on the changing state of nature and its implications for human well-being. This paper is intended to provide a broad overview of current knowledge of these issues. Information on changes in the status of species, size of populations, and extent and condition of habitats is patchy, with little data available for many of the taxa, regions and habitats of greatest importance to the delivery of ecosystem services. However, what we do know strongly suggests that, while exceptions exist, the changes currently underway are for the most part negative, anthropogenic in origin, ominously large and accelerating. The impacts of these changes on human society are idiosyncratic and patchily understood, but for the most part also appear to be negative and substantial. Forecasting future changes is limited by our poor understanding of the cascading impacts of change within communities, of threshold effects, of interactions between the drivers of change, and of linkages between the state of nature and human well-being. In assessing future science needs, we not only see a strong role for ecological data and theory, but also believe that much closer collaboration with social and earth system scientists is essential if ecology is to have a strong bearing on policy makers.
  Ecology Letters 11/2005; 8(11):1218-34.
• Source

  Available from: ubc.ca

  Article: Integrating environmental and spatial processes in ecological community dynamics.

  Karl Cottenie
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: The processes controlling the abundances of species across multiple sites form the cornerstone of modern ecology. In these metacommunities, the relative importance of local environmental and regional spatial processes is currently hotly debated, especially in terms of the validity of neutral model. I collected 158 published data sets with information on community structure, environmental and spatial variables. I showed that approximately 50% of the variation in community composition is explained by both environmental and spatial variables. The majority of the data sets were structured by species-sorting dynamics (SS), followed by a combination of SS and mass-effect dynamics. While neutral processes were the only structuring process in 8% of the collected natural communities, disregarding neutral dispersal processes would result in missing important patterns in 37% of the studied communities. Moreover, metacommunity characteristics such as dispersal type, habitat type and spatial scale predicted part of the detected variation in metacommunity structure.
  Ecology Letters 11/2005; 8(11):1175-82.
• Source

  Available from: mac.com

  Article: Effects of macroalgal species identity and richness on primary production in benthic marine communities.

  John F Bruno, Katharyn E Boyer, J E Duffy, Sarah C Lee, Johanna S Kertesz
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: Plant biodiversity can enhance primary production in terrestrial ecosystems, but biodiversity effects are largely unstudied in the ocean. We conducted a series of field and mesocosm experiments to measure the relative effects of macroalgal identity and richness on primary productivity (net photosynthetic rate) and biomass accumulation in hard substratum subtidal communities in North Carolina, USA. Algal identity consistently and strongly affected production; species richness effects, although often significent, were subtle. Partitioning of the net biodiversity effect indicated that complementarity effects were always positive and species were usually more productive in mixtures than in monoculture. Surprisingly, slow growing species performed relatively better in the most diverse treatments than the most productive species, thus selection effects were consistently negative. Our results suggest that several basic mechanisms underlying terrestrial plant biodiversity effects also operate in algal-based marine ecosystems, and thus may be general.
  Ecology Letters 11/2005; 8(11):1165-74.