Christopher M. Moore

Colby College · Biology Department

Interactions between plants and herbivores are central in most ecosystems, but their strength is highly variable. The amount of variability within a system is thought to influence most aspects of plant-herbivore biology, from ecological stability to plant defense evolution. Our understanding of what influences variability, however, is limited by sp...

The benefits of masting (volatile, quasi-synchronous seed production at lagged intervals) include satiation of seed predators, but these benefits come with a cost to mutualist pollen and seed dispersers. If the evolution of masting represents a balance between these benefits and costs, we expect mast avoidance in species that are heavily reliant on...

Predicting the impacts of global warming on mutualisms poses a significant challenge given the functional and life history differences that usually exist among interacting species. However, this is a critical endeavour since virtually all species on Earth depend on other species for survival and/or reproduction. The field of thermal ecology can pro...

The relationships that control seed production in trees are fundamental to understanding the evolution of forest species and their capacity to recover from increasing losses to drought, fire, and harvest. A synthesis of fecundity data from 714 species worldwide allowed us to examine hypotheses that are central to quantifying reproduction, a foundat...

Lack of tree fecundity data across climatic gradients precludes the analysis of how seed supply contributes to global variation in forest regeneration and biotic interactions responsible for biodiversity. A global synthesis of raw seedproduction data shows a 250‐fold increase in seed abundance from cold‐dry to warm‐wet climates, driven primarily by...

Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were assayed for a Mendelian antiherbivore defense that also affects tolerance to abiotic stressors. Urban...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22025-2

Indirect climate effects on tree fecundity that come through variation in size and growth (climate-condition interactions) are not currently part of models used to predict future forests. Trends in species abundances predicted from meta-analyses and species distribution models will be misleading if they depend on the conditions of individuals. Here...

The American Naturalist recently passed its sesquicentennial. Throughout this long history, it regularly encountered moments of introspection and debate over its goals, mission, identity, and audience. Here, we chronicle the history of those debates and transitions at critical moments. The Naturalist began as a popular magazine for amateur naturali...

Species interactions are context dependent, in that their direction and magnitude can vary across ecological conditions. For seed dispersal interactions—especially interactions between plants and seed‐caching animals—the direction of the interactions is often obscured because of seed mortality inherent in seed handling and the delayed effects of fi...

In this article, we present a modern commentary on Ludwig, Jones, and Holling’s classic paper, “Qualitative analysis of insect outbreak systems: the spruce budworm and forest,” published in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 1978. In contrast to papers that become classics for advancing one big idea, Ludwig et al.’s contribution is striking for its b...

Little is known about how mutualistic interactions affect the distribution of species richness on broad geographic scales. Because mutualism positively affects the fitness of all species involved in the interaction, one hypothesis is that the richness of species involved should be positively correlated across their range, especially for obligate re...

Mutualism describes the biological phenomenon where two or more species are reciprocally beneficial, regardless of their ecological intimacy or evolutionary history. Classic theory shows that mutualistic benefit must be relatively weak, or else it overpowers the stabilizing influence of intraspecific competition and leads to unrealistic, unbounded...

Mutualism describes the biological phenomenon where two or more species are reciprocally beneficial, regardless of their ecological intimacy or evolutionary history. Classic theory shows that mutualistic benefit must be relatively weak, or else it overpowers the stabilizing influence of intraspecific competition and leads to unrealistic, unbounded...

Little is known about how mutualistic interactions affect the distribution of species richness on broad geographic scales. It has been predicted that the richness of species involved in obligate mutualisms should be positively associated across their range. Whereas, if mutualisms are facilitative, the distribution of mutualists should be correlated...

AimWe determine the prevalence of mutualistic seed-dispersal interactions across the North American landscape and then test the hypothesis that patterns in interaction diversity are correlated with latitude, longitude, precipitation, midpoint elevation and the elevational range of sites. LocationNorth America north of the Mexican border. Methods We...

QPot is an R package for analyzing two-dimensional systems of stochastic differential equations. It provides users with a wide range of tools to simulate, analyze, and visualize the dynamics of these systems. One of QPot's key features is the computation of the quasi-potential, an important tool for studying stochastic systems. Quasi-potentials are...

Fire can potentially decimate soil seed banks, even for species that are abundant in fire-prone areas. Many plants, like the widespread and dominant members of the genus Arctostaphylos in the fire-prone California Floristic Province, have seeds that (i) have no clear adaptions for dispersal and (ii) experience lethal fire temperatures if present on...

Background/Question/Methods Interactions between individuals belonging to species and guilds ultimately mediate ecological dynamics. Mutualistic interactions are a subset of direct interactions where both participants incur an increase in fitness. These types of interactions are found in virtually all communities and differently contribute to ecol...

Background/Question/Methods Arctostaphylos and Ceanothus are the two most taxonomically diverse woody taxa in the California Floristic Province and share very similar ecologies that are independent of evolutionary history. Coincident with taxonomic diversity, there is a relatively large amount of diversity in Arctostaphylos seed morphology, a key...

The Sierra San Pedro Mártir (SSPM) in northern Baja California, Mexico, is a remote mountain at the southern edge of the California Floristic Province, a vegetation type that includes the Sierra Nevada of California and western Nevada. Unlike most forests in the southwestern United States, the forests of the SSPM have never been logged and have exp...

Background / Purpose: We investigated diaspore morphometrics in plants with ambiguous dispersal modalities. Main conclusion: We produced a gradient from more fruity, fleshy to drier, nuttier diaspores.

Background/Question/Methods Three inclusive hypotheses have been suggested as to why seed dispersal benefits plants; the most understudied of these hypotheses is the directed dispersal hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that a benefit of animal-mediated seed dispersal is that seeds are dispersed to microsites that facilitate seed germination. We e...