Elizabeth J Kleynhans

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of British Columbia

Interspecific competition can strongly influence the evolutionary response of a species to a changing environment, impacting the chance that the species survives or goes extinct. Previouswork has shown that when two species compete for a temporally shifting resource distribution, the species lagging behind the resource peak is the first to go extin...

In the absence of migration, species persistence depends on adaption to a changing environment, but whether and how adaptation to global change is altered by community diversity is not understood. Community diversity may prevent, enhance or alter how species adapt to changing conditions by influencing population sizes, genetic diversity and/or the...

Supplementary Figures 1-4, Supplementary Tables 1-9, Supplementary Notes 1-2, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References

A central current debate in community ecology concerns the relative importance of deterministic versus stochastic processes underlying community structure. However, the concept of stochasticity presents several profound philosophical, theoretical and empirical challenges, which we address here. The philosophical argument that nothing in nature is t...

Animals cope with seasonal variation in environmental factors by adjustments of physiology and life history. When seasonal variation is partly predictable, such adjustments can be based on a genetic component or be phenotypically flexible. Animals have to allocate limited resources over different demands, including immune function. Accordingly, imm...

Background/Question/Methods Understanding how species adapt to environmental change is critically important, yet most experimental studies investigate adaptation on single isolated species. This is problematic as species do not live in isolation – they live in complex communities where they interact with many other species. Because ecological int...

Lists of invasive alien species (IAS) are essential for preventing, controlling, and reporting on the state of biological invasions. However, these lists suffer from a range of errors, with serious consequences for their use in science, policy, and management. Here we (1) collated and classified errors in IAS listing using a taxonomy of uncertainty...

Resource partitioning among mammalian savanna herbivores is thought to be predominantly driven by differences in body size. In general, large herbivore species utilize abundant low quality forage while small herbivores focus on scarcer high quality food items. However, in a natural system other factors such as digestive strategy, season and the pre...

Aim Invasive alien species (IAS) pose a significant threat to biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2010 Biodiversity Target, and the associated indicator for IAS, has stimulated globally coordinated efforts to quantify patterns in the extent of biological invasion, its impact on biodiversity and policy responses. Here, we report o...

We mapped and measured all of the Adansonia rubrostipa trees in 40 ha of dry deciduous forest in Kirindy Forest, Menabe, western Madagascar. Survey effort was split between three compartments which had been heavily logged or selectively logged for timber trees, not including A. rubrostipa, in the 1980s, or which remained unlogged. We recorded 304 t...