Eliot J B Mcintire

Natural Resources Canada | NRCan · Pacific Forestry Centre

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. References SUMMARY: Models describing the biotic drivers that create and maintain biological diversity within trophic levels have focused primarily on negative interactions (i.e. competition), leaving marginal room for positive interactions (i.e. facilitation). We show facilitation to be a ubiquitous driver of biod...

Understanding animal responses to landscape elements helps forecast population reactions to changing landscape conditions. The challenge is that some behaviors are poorly known and difficult to estimate. We assessed how uncertainty in behavioral responses to dense woods, an avoided landscape structure, impacts functional connectivity among reproduc...

Changes in Earth's environment are expected to stimulate changes in the composition and structure of ecosystems, but it is still unclear how the dynamics of these responses will play out over time. In long-lived forest systems, communities of established individuals may be resistant to respond to directional climate change, but may be highly sensit...

Facilitation (positive interactions) has emerged as a dominant ecological mechanism in many ecosystems. Its importance has recently been expanded to include intraspecific interactions, creating the potential for higher-level natural selection within species. Using multiple lines of evidence, we show that conspecific facilitation within the southern...

The ecological processes that create spatial patterns have been examined by direct measurement and through measurement of patterns resulting from experimental manipulations. But in many situations, creating experiments and direct measurement of spatial processes can be difficult or impossible. Here, we identify and define a rapidly emerging alterna...

Widespread impacts of a warming planet are fuelling climate change mitigation efforts world-wide. Decision makers are turning to forests, the largest terrestrial primary producer, as a nature-based contribution to mitigation efforts. Resource-based economies, however, have yet to include carbon (C) in their resource planning, slowing the implementa...

Making predictions from ecological models-and comparing them to data-offers a coherent approach to evaluate model quality, regardless of model complexity or modelling paradigm. To date, our ability to use predictions for developing, validating, updating, integrating and applying models across scientific disciplines while influencing management deci...

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...

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...

Making predictions from ecological models-and comparing them to data-offers a coherent approach to evaluate model quality, regardless of model complexity or modelling paradigm. To date, our ability to use predictions for developing, validating, updating, integrating and applying models across scientific disciplines while influencing management deci...

The rate of human-induced environmental change continues to accelerate, stimulating the need for rapid and science-based decision making. The recent availability of cyberinfrastructure, open-source data and novel techniques has increased opportunities to use ecological forecasts to predict environmental change. But to effectively inform environment...

Distributions of landbirds in Canadian northern forests are expected to be affected by climate change, but it remains unclear which pathways are responsible for projected climate effects. Determining whether climate change acts indirectly through changing fire regimes and/or vegetation dynamics, or directly through changes in climatic suitability m...

Making predictions from ecological models – and comparing these predictions to data – offers a coherent approach to objectively evaluate model quality, regardless of model complexity or modeling paradigm. To date, our ability to use predictions for developing, validating, updating, integrating and applying models across scientific disciplines while...

La competencia y la beneficencia [facilitación] simultáneas pueden tener importantes repercusiones en la estructura de la comunidad vegetal". Hunter y Aarssen (1988) "... los mecanismos responsables del ensamblaje de una comunidad vegetal que son los que determinan la naturaleza y la magnitud de los efectos de la facilitación en la composición de l...

In his letter to the editor, Körner (2021) commented on our recent assessment of climate impacts on tree growth at treeline (Camarero et al. 2021). We share some of his opinions such as the non‐linear responses of growth to temperature. We also agree that focusing on temperature‐dependent processes such as growth can improve forecasts of treeline r...

Increased fire activity due to climate change may impact the successional dynamics of boreal forests, with important consequences for caribou habitat. Early successional forests have been shown to support lower quantities of caribou forage lichens, but geographic variation in, and controls on, the rates of lichen recovery has been largely unexplore...

Prediction from models and data in Ecology has a long history and can be made from many types of statistical, simulation, and other classes of models. To date, our ability to use the predictive approach as a tool for developing, validating, updating, integrating and applying models across scientific disciplines and to influence management decisions...

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...

Climate warming is expected to positively alter upward and poleward treelines which are controlled by low temperature and a short growing season. Despite the importance of treelines as a bioassay of climate change, a global field assessment and posterior forecasting of tree growth at annual scales is lacking. Using annually resolved tree‐ring data...

Land-use change and climate change are recognized as two main drivers of the current biodiversity decline. Protected areas help safeguard the landscape from additional anthropo-genic disturbances and, when properly designed, can help species cope with climate change impacts. When designed to protect the regional biodiversity rather than to conserve...

https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jwmg.21937

Aim A strong influence of climate on species’ range is often assumed, and forms the basis for projecting many future range shifts with changing climate. Particularly at poleward latitudinal or elevational edges, abiotic conditions are thought to play a major role in limiting distributions. We estimated the roles of climate and landscape features in...

Boreal caribou (Woodland Caribou, boreal population; Rangifer tarandus caribou) is a prominent mammal at the heart of a decades-long conflict between a growing resource sector and the associated risks to biodiversity. We employed the ISO 31010 Bow-tie Risk Assessment Tool (BRAT) to evaluate the cumulative effects of anthropogenic and natural factor...

Climate change is projected to dramatically increase boreal wildfire activity, with broad ecological and socioeconomic consequences. As global temperatures rise, periods with elevated fire weather are expected to increase in frequency and duration, which would be expected to increase the number and size of fires. Statistical forecasts or simulation...

NetLogoR is an R package to build and run spatially explicit agent‐based models (SE‐ABMs) using the R language. SE‐ABMs are models that simulate the fate of entities at the individual level within a spatial context and where patterns emerge at the population level. NetLogoR follows the same framework as the NetLogo software (Wilensky 1999). Rather...

1.Global change ecologists have often used trees under weak competition (e.g., dominant/codominant trees) to examine relationships between climatic change and tree growth. Scaling up these results to a forest relies on the assumption that the climatic change‐tree growth relationship is not affected by tree‐level competition. 2. Using permanent samp...

Synchronized and variable reproduction by perennial plants, called mast seeding, is a major reproductive strategy of trees. The need to accumulate sufficient resources after depletion following fruiting (resource budget), the efficiency of mass flowering for outcross pollination (pollen coupling), or the external factors preventing reproduction (en...

With their imposing grandeur, the small number of very tall tree species attract a disproportionate amount of scientific study. We right this bias by focusing here on the shorter trees, which grow in the shade of the giants and many other places besides. That tall trees are so restricted in distribution indicates that there are far more habitats av...

Future human land use and climate change may disrupt movement behaviors of terrestrial animals, thereby altering the ability of individuals to move across a landscape. Some of the expected changes result from processes whose effects will be difficult to alter, such as global climate change. We present a novel framework in which we use models to (1)...

1.Forests play a strong role in the global carbon cycle by absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide through increasing forest biomass. Understanding temporal trends of forest net aboveground biomass change (ΔAGB) can help infer how forest carbon sequestration responds to on‐going climate changes. Despite wide spatial variation in the long‐term average...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179294.].

Fire activity in North American forests is expected to increase substantially with climate change. This would represent a growing risk to human settlements and industrial infrastructure proximal to forests, and to the forest products industry. We modelled fire size distributions in southern Qué bec as functions of fire weather and land cover, thus...

Spatial variation in the proportional abundance of the conifer-dominated forest (%). (PDF)

Influence of landscape fuel composition on the shape of the predicted distribution of lightning-caused fires sizes under the best supported model (full model where β and θ are both function of fire weather and land cover, see Tables 1 and 2). Predicted FSDs for hypothetical landscapes from 100% conifer to 100% disturbed in 10% increments, under mea...

Influence of (a) β and (b) θ parameters on the shape of the tapered Pareto survival function. For illustrative purposes, we fixed θ at 100,000 in (a) and β at 0.5 in (b). (PDF)

Influence of landscape fuel composition on the shape of the predicted distribution of lightning-caused fires sizes under the best supported model (full model where β and θ are both function of fire weather and land cover, see Tables 1 and 2). Predicted FSDs for hypothetical landscapes from 100% conifer to 100% deciduous in 10% increments, under ext...

Histogram of the starting date (month) of lightning- (blue bars) and human- (red bars) caused fires during the 2000–2010 period. (PDF)

Estimated survival functions for all competitive hypotheses tested (black lines) with their 95% confidence intervals (grey lines) along with empirical survival function for the distribution of human-caused fires sizes (red lines). β0 and γ0, intercepts; W, fire weather and V, land-cover terms. (PDF)

Raw data. (RDATA)

Estimated survival functions for all competitive hypotheses tested (black lines) with their 95% confidence intervals (grey lines) along with empirical survival function for the distribution of lightning-caused fires sizes (blue lines). β0 and γ0, intercepts; W, fire weather and V, land-cover terms. (PDF)

Correlation matrix of the Spearman’s rho coefficients. HW, hardwood; CN, coniferous; D, recently disturbed; O, open areas; WT, open water. (PDF)

Annual variations of the Monthly Drought Code (MDC) of June for the period 2000–2010. (PDF)

Predictive models of fire frequency conditional on weather and land cover are essential to assess how future cover-type distributions and weather conditions may influence fire regimes. We modelled the effects of bottom-up variables (e.g. land cover) and top-down variables (e.g. fire weather) simultaneously with data aggregated or interpolated to sp...

Spatially explicit individual-based models (SE-IBMs) can simulate species’ movement behaviors. Although such models allow many applications to ecology and conservation biology and are useful for management purposes, they are difficult to parameterize directly from the kinds of observational data that are generally available. Coupled with pattern-or...

The transition from seedlings into trees at alpine tree lines is a temperature-limited process that ultimately sets the tree line elevation at a global scale. As such, tree lines may be key bioassays of global warming effects on species distributions. For global warming to promote upward tree line migration, as predicted, seedlings must be availabl...

AimsWhile treeline positions are globally correlated to growing season temperatures, seedling establishment, an important process of alpine treeline dynamics, is additionally controlled by regional-scale factors such as snow cover duration, desiccating winds and biotic interactions. Knowing that alpine treelines have shown contrasting responses to...

Population models commonly assume that the demographic parameters are spatially invariant, but there is considerable evidence that population growth rate (r) and the strength of density dependence (β) can vary over a species' range. To address this issue we developed a spatially explicit Gompertz population model based on the spatially varying coef...

Protected area networks are the dominant conservation approach that is used worldwide for protecting biodiversity. Conservation planning in managed forests, however, presents challenges when endangered species use old-growth forests targeted by the forest industry for timber supply. In many ecosystems, this challenge is further complicated by the o...

Assessing spatial variation in waterfowl harvest probabilities from banding data is challenging because reporting and recovery probabilities have distinct spatial patterns that covary temporally with harvesting regulations, hunter effort, and reporting methods. We analyzed direct band recovery data from American black ducks banded on the Canadian b...

Many animal species exhibit broad-scale latitudinal or longitudinal gradients in their response to biotic and abiotic components of their habitat. Although knowing the underlying mechanism of these patterns can be critical to the development of sound measures for the preservation or recovery of endangered species, few studies have yet identified wh...

Eliot McIntire raises a provocative question: If biodiversity is all about "survival of the fittest," are the fittest always the strongest competitors? According to McIntire, global biodiversity is not just a matter of "dog eat dog," but rather a matter of one species helping another.

Masting, the synchronous and episodic production of seed crops, is thought to benefit plant reproductive success through positive density‐dependent effects on pollination, dispersal and seed survival. Of these, only increased pollination efficiency in mast years can be a proximate mechanism for masting by synchronizing reproductive effort across in...

Background/Question/Methods Globally, alpine treeline positions are defined by temperature which has led to the assumption that treelines would rise in response to climate change. But recruitment above treeline is also controlled by local drivers which modulate the effect of climate. This study aims to measure the relative effect of abiotic (temp...

Elevated baseline adult female elk mortality from wolves in years with high winter precipitation could affect elk abundance as winters across the western US become drier and wolves recolonize portions of the region. In the absence of human harvest, wolves had additive, although limited, effects on mortality. However, human harvest, and its apparent...

Aims Natural disturbances leave long-term legacies that vary among landscapes and ecosystem types, and which become integral parts of successional processes at a given location. As humans change land use, not only are immediate post-disturbance patterns altered, but the processes of recovery themselves are likely altered by the disturbance. We asse...

Many animal species exhibit broad-scale latitudinal or longitudinal gradients in their response to biotic and abiotic components of their habitat. Although knowing the underlying mechanism of these patterns can be critical to the development of sound measures for the preservation or recovery of endangered species, few studies have yet identified wh...

Animals in fragmented landscapes have a major challenge to move between high-quality habitat patches through lower-quality matrix. Two current mechanistic hypotheses that describe the movement used by animals outside of their preferred patches (e.g., high-quality habitat or home range) are the biased, correlated random walk (BCRW) and the foray loo...

• In masting trees, synchronized, heavy reproductive events are thought to deplete stored resources and to impose a replenishment period before subsequent masting. However, direct evidence of resource depletion in wild, masting trees is very rare. Here, we examined the timing and magnitude (local vs individual-level) of stored nutrient depletion af...

Background/Question/Methods Cone production is known to decrease with altitude due to low growing season temperatures, which reduces the developmental period available to cone buds at the alpine treeline. However, the microclimate experienced by individual plants differs from ambient air temperature: wind has a direct negative effect on plant mic...

Background/Question/Methods Facilitation (positive interactions among in