Lucas Deschamps

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières · Département des Sciences de l'Environnement

Selection within natural communities has mainly been studied along large abiotic gradients, while the selection of individuals within populations should occur locally in response to biotic filters. To better leverage the role of the latter, we considered the hierarchal nature of environmental selection for the multiple dimensions of the trait space...

The alteration of environmental conditions has two major outcomes on the demographics of living organisms: population decline of the common species and extinction of the rarest ones. Halting the decline of abundant species as well as the erosion of biodiversity require solutions that may be mismatched, despite being rooted in similar causes. In thi...

Evidence points out that increasing plant productivity associated with greater erect shrub abundance alters soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in the Arctic. However, the underlying plant economic traits remain poorly examined, which limits our understanding of plant–environment interactions driving tundra carbon cycling. We explored how erect shrub...

It is of prime importance to understand feedbacks due to the release of carbon (C) stored in permafrost soils (permafrost‐climate feedback) and direct impacts of climatic variations on permafrost dynamics therefore received considerable attention. However, indirect effects of global change, such as the variation in soil nutrient availability and gr...

Aim: Selection within natural communities has mainly been studied along large abiotic gradient, while the selection of individuals within population should occur locally under the play of biotic filter. To better seize the role of the latter, we postulated that the hierarchal nature of environmental selection and the multiple dimension of species t...

Nutrient availability for tundra vegetation could change drastically due to increasing temperatures and frequency of nitrogen deposition in the Arctic. Few studies have simultaneously examined the response of plant communities to these two pressures over a long period. This study aims to assess which driver between increasing nitrogen (N) and phosp...

Anthropogenic changes can have dramatic effects on wild populations. Moreover, by promoting the emergence of vector-borne diseases in many ecosystems, those changes can lead to local extinction of native wildlife. One of those diseases, avian malaria, has been shown to be on the rise in New Zealand, threatening native bird species that are among th...

Significance Identifying species assemblages that boost the provision of multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously (multifunctionality) is crucial to undertake effective restoration actions aiming at simultaneously promoting biodiversity and high multifunctionality in a changing world. By disentangling the effect of multiple traits on multifuncti...

Geese can profoundly affect arctic ecosystems directly (e.g., by grazing vegetation) and indirectly (e.g. by changing nutrient cycling resulting from faces inputs and by reducing plant litter). In the Arctic, behavior and abundance of geese have changed due to climate and land-use change. While the short-term effects of increased goose populations...

The way species avoid each other in a community by using resources differently across space and time is one of the main drivers of species coexistence in nature1,2. This mechanism, known as niche differentiation, has been widely examined theoretically but still lacks thorough experimental validation in plants. To shape niche differences over time,...

Explaining the existence of highly diverse plant communities under strong abiotic filtering is a long-standing challenge in ecology. Hierarchical aspects of abiotic and biotic filters are rarely taken into account and studies focus mainly on community-level aggregated patterns. Because variations in biotic conditions might take place in short abiot...

Neonicotinoids (NEOCs) are insecticides that are widely used worldwide in the culture of maize and soya. Whereas they specifically target terrestrial insects by acting as agonists of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in their nervous system, their effects on the cholinergic system of vertebrates is still unclear. Moreover, there is an increasing c...

This paper describes simply the principles behind latent factor models and proposes an efficient formulation implemented in the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo software stan to reveal latent variables structuring community matrix. We considered abundances as following a poisson distribution, but this code can be modified to work with any distribution of in...

Wetland ecosystems are changing, both in species composition and functional structure. To understand the direction and amplitude of these changes, ecologists study the dynamics of plant functional traits. This can be done by studying the dominance, or central tendency, of plant functional traits along a gradient of environmental conditions. However...