Mary I. O’Connor

Mary I. O’Connor
University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Zoology

About

105
Publications
49,651
Reads
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9,906
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2011 - present
University of British Columbia
Position
  • University of British Columbia
January 2003 - present
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Publications

Publications (105)
Article
Full-text available
Predicting the effects of climate change on plant disease is critical for protecting ecosystems and food production. Here, we show how disease pressure responds to short‐term weather, historical climate and weather anomalies by compiling a global database (4339 plant–disease populations) of disease prevalence in both agricultural and wild plant sys...
Article
Biogenic habitats, including eelgrass, support productive and diverse species assemblages in spatially heterogeneous seascapes. Eelgrass-associated faunal diversity depends not only on conditions within each eelgrass meadow but also on their probability of dispersing among eelgrass meadows in a seascape in which meadows are separated by soft sedime...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Biogenic structural complexity increases mobile animal richness and abundance at local, regional and global scales, yet animal taxa vary in their response to complexity. When these taxa also vary functionally, habitat structures favouring certain taxa may have consequences for ecosystem function. We characterised global patterns of epifaunal in...
Article
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The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) aims to link biophysical constraints on individual metabolic rates to the emergence of patterns at the population and ecosystem scales. Because MTE links temperature’s kinetic effects on individual metabolism to ecological processes at higher levels of organization, it holds great potential to mechanistically p...
Preprint
Full-text available
Biogenic habitats, including eelgrass, support productive and diverse species assemblages in spatially heterogeneous seascapes. Eelgrass-associated faunal diversity depends not only on conditions within each eelgrass meadow but also on their probability of dispersing among eelgrass meadows in a seascape in which meadows are separated by soft sedime...
Article
Full-text available
A marine protected area (MPA) network of multiple reserves can protect biodiversity across space, but to be effective, network configuration should support dispersal among MPAs as well as spillover to unprotected habitats. The ability of MPAs to function as an interacting network of populations connected by dispersal, however, is difficult to estim...
Article
Ecosystem restoration can increase the health and resilience of nature and humanity. As a result, the international community is championing habitat restoration as a primary solution to address the dual climate and biodiversity crises. Yet most ecosystem restoration efforts to date have underperformed, failed, or been burdened by high costs that pr...
Chapter
Au cours des 25 dernières années, l’idée que les changements de biodiversité peuvent influencer le fonctionnement des écosystèmes a évolué d’une notion controversée à un concept pleinement accepté par les communautés scientifique et politique. Alors que ce domaine scientifique atteint sa maturité, il est temps d’évaluer les avancées réalisées, d’ex...
Article
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A global decline in seagrass populations has led to renewed calls for their conservation as important providers of biogenic and foraging habitat, shoreline stabilization and carbon storage. Eelgrass (Zostera marina) occupies the largest geographic range among seagrass species spanning a commensurately broad spectrum of environmental conditions. In...
Article
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Temperature can influence mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. These effects are expected to vary geographically and over time in both magnitude and direction and may interact with other environmental variables, making it difficult to anticipate changes in response to climate change. Here, we investigate global variation in temperature–dengue relat...
Article
The logistic growth model is one of the most frequently used formalizations of density dependence affecting population growth, persistence and evolution. Ecological and evolutionary theory, and applications to understand population change over time often include this model. However, the assumptions and limitations of this popular model are often no...
Article
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The effect of climate warming on community composition is expected to be contingent on competitive outcomes, yet approaches to projecting ecological outcomes often rely on measures of density‐independent performance across temperatures. Recent theory suggests that the temperature response of competitive ability differs in shape from that of populat...
Article
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Aim Animals couple habitats by three types of movement: dispersal, migration, and foraging, which dynamically link populations, communities, and ecosystems. Across these types, movement distances tend to correlate with each other, potentially reflecting allometric scaling with body mass, but ecological and evolutionary species' traits may constrain...
Article
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The causes of biodiversity change are of great scientific interest and central to policy efforts aimed at meeting biodiversity targets. Changes in species diversity and high rates of compositional turnover have been reported worldwide. In many cases, trends in biodiversity are detected, but these trends are rarely causally attributed to possible dr...
Article
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Species richness is an essential biodiversity variable indicative of ecosystem states and rates of invasion, speciation and extinction both contemporarily and in fossil records. However, limited sampling effort and spatial aggregation of organisms mean that biodiversity surveys rarely observe every species in the survey area. Here we present a non-...
Preprint
Full-text available
A Marine Protected Area (MPA) network, in which multiple reserves are designated in a region, can promote the protection of biodiversity across space. To be effective as a network, the design must consider whether MPAs are likely to be connected through the movement of individuals of species of interest. Additionally, network design may explicitly...
Article
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Recent research has revealed the diversity and biomass of life across ecosystems, but how that biomass is distributed across body sizes of all living things remains unclear. We compile the present-day global body size-biomass spectra for the terrestrial, marine, and subterranean realms. To achieve this compilation, we pair existing and updated biom...
Preprint
Full-text available
Predicting effects of climate change on plant disease is critical for protecting ecosystems and food production. Climate change could exacerbate plant disease because parasites may be quicker to acclimate and adapt to novel climatic conditions than their hosts due to their smaller body sizes and faster generation times. Here we show how disease pre...
Article
Full-text available
Thermal variability is a key driver of ecological processes, affecting organisms and populations across multiple temporal scales. Despite the ubiquity of variation, biologists lack a quantitative synthesis of the observed ecological consequences of thermal variability across a wide range of taxa, phenotypic traits and experimental designs. Here, we...
Article
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Distribution of Earth’s biomes is structured by the match between climate and plant traits, which in turn shape associated communities and ecosystem processes and services. However, that climate–trait match can be disrupted by historical events, with lasting ecosystem impacts. As Earth’s environment changes faster than at any time in human history,...
Article
Zostera marina (seagrass) is a coastal marine angiosperm that sustains a diverse and productive ecosystem. Seagrass‐associated microbiota support host health, yet the ecological processes that maintain biodiversity and stability of the seagrass leaf microbiome are poorly understood. We tested two hypotheses: (1) microbes select seagrass leaves as h...
Preprint
The effect of climate warming on future community composition is expected to be contingent on competitive outcomes, yet we currently lack mechanistic ecological understanding of how temperature affects competitive ability. Here, we combine resource competition theory with metabolic scaling theory and test hypotheses about how the temperature depend...
Article
Full-text available
Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...
Preprint
Temperature can influence mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. These effects are expected to vary geographically and over time in both magnitude and direction and may interact with other environmental variables, making it difficult to anticipate changes in response to climate change. Here, we investigate global variation in temperature–dengue relat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Species richness is an essential biodiversity variable indicative of ecosystem states and mass extinctions both contemporarily and in fossil records. However, limitations to sampling effort and spatial aggregation of organisms mean that surveys often fail to observe some species, making it difficult to estimate true richness and hinder the comparis...
Preprint
Full-text available
Animals couple habitats by three types of movement: dispersal, migration, and foraging, which dynamically link populations, communities, and ecosystems. Spatial distances of movement tend to correlate with each other, reflecting shared allometric scaling with body size, but may diverge due to biomechanical, phylogenetic, and ecological constraints....
Chapter
This chapter reviews the role experiments have played in advancing biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) knowledge. In BEF experiments, the defining feature is that some measure of diversity – species richness, functional diversity – is manipulated as the independent fixed variable and response variables related to ecosystem functioning are...
Article
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While considerable evidence exists of biogeographic patterns in the intensity of species interactions, the influence of these patterns on variation in community structure is less clear. Studying how the distributions of traits in communities vary along global gradients can inform how variation in interactions and other factors contribute to the pro...
Article
In aquatic foundation species, composition and abundance of associated epibionts can change substantially over small spatial distances. Such spatial variation can reflect top-down control by consumers, bottom-up control by abiotic factors or facilitation, or a combination of processes. We used visual and molecular surveys to describe spatial patter...
Article
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Physiological stress may induce sublethal effects on fitness by limiting energy availability and shifting energy allocation, which can incur reproductive costs. Sublethal reproductive costs may affect vital rates, linking stress events such as heat waves to population demography. Here, we test the hypothesis that heat wave intensity and consecutive...
Article
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AbstractA scientific understanding of the biological world arises when ideas about how nature works are formalized, tested, refined, and then tested again. Although the benefits of feedback between theoretical and empirical research are widely acknowledged by ecologists, this link is still not as strong as it could be in ecological research. This i...
Article
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Feedbacks are an essential feature of resilient socio-economic systems, yet the feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing are not fully accounted for in global policy efforts that consider future scenarios for human activities and their consequences for nature. Failure to integrate feedbacks in our knowledge frameworks...
Article
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The dispersal of marine organisms is a critical process for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across a seascape. Understanding the patterns of habitat connectivity that arise from the movement of multiple species can highlight the role of regional processes in maintaining local community structure. However, quantifying the p...
Article
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Forecasting how climate change will impact biological systems represents a grand challenge for biologists. However, climate change biology lacks an effective framework for anticipating and resolving uncertainty. Here, we introduce the concept of climate change wildcards: biological or bioclimatic processes with a high degree of uncertainty and a la...
Technical Report
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Eelgrass (Zostera marina) meadows are influenced by human activities occurring at various spatial scales. We applied a standardized human impact metric previously applied to eelgrass in Atlantic Canada to ten eelgrass meadows in six bays in southern British Columbia to quantify the extent of human activities occurring at both the bayscale and local...
Article
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Significance Food security is not simply about maintaining yields, but it is also about the need for a stable supply of nutritionally diverse foods. Obtaining nutritious food is a major challenge facing humanity, and diverse aquatic ecosystems can help meet this goal. To test how aquatic biodiversity affects human health, we assembled a dataset of...
Article
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Seagrass meadows are among the most productive and diverse marine ecosystems, providing essential structure, functions, and services. They are also among the most impacted by human activities and in urgent need of better management and protection. In Canada, eelgrass (Zostera marina) meadows are found along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coasts,...
Article
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The seagrass Zostera marina is a widespread foundational species in temperate coastal ecosystems that supports diverse communities of epiphytes and grazers. Bacteria link the production of seagrass to higher trophic levels and are thought to influence seagrass biology and health. Yet, we lack a clear understanding of the factors that structure the...
Article
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Variability in the environment defines the structure and dynamics of all living systems, from organisms to ecosystems. Species have evolved traits and strategies that allow them to detect, exploit and predict the changing environment. These traits allow organisms to maintain steady internal conditions required for physiological functioning through...
Article
Epibiotic microorganisms link seagrass productivity to higher trophic levels, but little is known about the processes structuring these communities, and which taxa consistently associate with seagrass. We investigated epibiotic microeukaryotes on seagrass (Zostera marina) leaves, substrates and planktonic microeukaryotes in ten meadows in the North...
Article
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Synthesis has become ubiquitous in ecology. Despite its widespread application to a broad range of research topics, it remains unclear how synthesis has affected the discipline. Using a case study of publications (n = 2304) from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis compared with papers with similar keywords from the Web of Scie...
Preprint
Full-text available
Variability in the environment defines the structure and dynamics of all living systems. Organisms have evolved traits and strategies that allow them to detect, exploit and predict the changing environment. Organisms maintain steady internal conditions required for physiological functioning through feedback mechanisms that allow internal conditions...
Preprint
Full-text available
Humanity depends on biodiversity for health, well-being and a stable environment. As biodiversity change accelerates, we are still discovering the full range of consequences for human health and well-being. Here, we test the hypothesis -- derived from biodiversity - ecosystem functioning theory -- that species richness and ecological functional div...
Article
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The persistence of ecological systems in changing environments requires energy, materials, and information. Although the importance of information to ecological function has been widely recognized, the fundamental principles of ecological science as commonly expressed do not reflect this central role of information processing. We articulate five fu...
Article
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Laboratory measurements of physiological and demographic tolerances are important to understanding the impact of climate change on species diversity; however, it has been recognized that forecasts based solely on these laboratory estimates overestimate risk by omitting the capacity for species to utilize microclimatic variation via behavioral adjus...
Article
Although evidence suggests that humans have elevated global extinction rates and lowered global species richness, species richness at scales smaller than the globe can increase, decrease or remain the same. However, the role of spatial scale is rarely considered as a modifier in driving how richness change unfolds. We first observed richness change...
Preprint
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Ecological communities are jointly structured by dispersal, environmental niche filtering, and biotic interactions. Metacommunity ecology provides a framework for understanding how these processes combine to determine community composition in sites that are connected through dispersal. Here, we use the Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities...
Article
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Coastal seascapes can support high animal diversity and secondary productivity that attracts conservation interest and provides ecosystem services. Though the importance of spatial structure in marine habitats is well known, determining the dominant spatial scale for biodiversity patterns is an often‐overlooked dimension of the ecological and conse...
Article
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Metacommunity theory provides an understanding of how spatial processes determine the structure and function of communities at local and regional scales. Although metacommunity theory has considered trophic dynamics in the past, it has been performed idiosyncratically with a wide selection of possible dynamics. Trophic metacommunity theory needs a...
Article
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The temperature dependence of highly conserved subcellular metabolic systems affects ecological patterns and processes across scales, from organisms to ecosystems. Population density at carrying capacity plays an important role in evolutionary processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem function, yet how it varies with temperature-dependent metabolism r...
Article
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As thermal regimes change worldwide, projections of future population and species persistence often require estimates of how population growth rates depend on temperature. These projections rarely account for how temporal variation in temperature can systematically modify growth rates relative to projections based on constant temperatures. Here, we...
Preprint
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As thermal regimes change worldwide, projections of future population and species persistence often require estimates of how population growth rates depend on temperature. These projections rarely account for how temporal variation in temperature can systematically modify growth rates relative to projections based on constant temperatures. Here, we...
Article
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Our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) applies mainly to fine spatial scales. New research is required if we are to extend this knowledge to broader spatial scales that are relevant for conservation decisions. Here, we use simulations to examine conditions that generate scale dependence of the BEF...
Article
Form–function relationships in plants underlie their ecosystem roles in supporting higher trophic levels through primary production, detrital pathways, and habitat provision. For widespread, phenotypically-variable plants, productivity may differ not only across abiotic conditions, but also from distinct morphological or demographic traits. A singl...
Article
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Latitudinal gradients in species interactions are widely cited as potential causes or consequences of global patterns of biodiversity. However, mechanistic studies documenting changes in interactions across broad geographic ranges are limited. We surveyed predation intensity on common prey (live amphipods and gastropods) in communities of eelgrass...
Preprint
Full-text available
Predicting population persistence and dynamics in the context of global change is a major challenge for ecology. A widely held prediction is that population abundance at carrying capacity decreases with warming, assuming no change in resource supply, due to increased individual resource demands associated with higher metabolic rates. However, this...
Preprint
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In recent decades, environmental drivers of community change have been associated with changes in biodiversity from local to global scales. Here we evaluate the role of anthropogenic drivers in marine ecosystems as drivers of change in local species richness with a meta-analysis of a novel dataset of temporal change in species richness. We paired b...
Article
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Species diversity affects the functioning of ecosystems, including the efficiency by which communities capture limited resources, produce biomass, recycle and retain biologically essential nutrients. These ecological functions ultimately support the ecosystem services upon which humanity depends. Despite hundreds of experimental tests of the effect...
Article
Global species extinction rates are orders of magnitude above the background rate documented in the fossil record. However, recent data syntheses have found mixed evidence for patterns of net species loss at local spatial scales. For example, two recent data meta-analyses have found that species richness is decreasing in some locations and is incre...
Article
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Climate change is shifting species' distribution and phenology. Ecological traits, such as mobility or reproductive mode, explain variation in observed rates of shift for some taxa. However, estimates of relationships between traits and climate responses could be influenced by how responses are measured. We compiled a global dataset of 651 publishe...
Article
The modern biodiversity crisis reflects global extinctions and local introductions. Human activities have dramatically altered rates and scales of processes that regulate biodiversity at local scales [1-7]. Reconciling the threat of global biodiversity loss [2, 4, 6-9] with recent evidence of stability at fine spatial scales [10,11] is a major chal...
Article
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1.Herbivore communities can be sensitive to changes in predator pressure (top-down effects) and resource availability (bottom-up effects) in a wide range of systems. However, it remains unclear whether such top-down and bottom-up effects reflect direct impacts of predators and/or resources on herbivores, or are indirect, reflecting altered interact...
Article
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Nutrient pollution and reduced grazing each can stimulate algal blooms as shown by numerous experiments. But because experiments rarely incorporate natural variation in environmental factors and biodiversity, conditions determining the relative strength of bottom-up and top-down forcing remain unresolved. We factorially added nutrients and reduced...
Article
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Abstract Trophic cascades are indirect positive effects of predators on resources via control of intermediate consumers. Larger-bodied predators appear to induce stronger trophic cascades (a greater rebound of resource density toward carrying capacity), but how this happens is unknown because we lack a clear depiction of how the strength of trophic...
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Aim To assess confidence in conclusions about climate‐driven biological change through time, and identify approaches for strengthening confidence scientific conclusions about ecological impacts of climate change. Location Global. Methods We outlined a framework for strengthening confidence in inferences drawn from biological climate impact studie...
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Changing temperature can substantially shift ecological communities by altering the strength and stability of trophic interactions. Because many ecological rates are constrained by temperature, new approaches are required to understand how simultaneous changes in multiple rates alter the relative performance of species and their trophic interaction...
Article
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Increases in the frequency, severity and duration of temperature extremes are anticipated in the near future. Although recent work suggests that changes in temperature variation will have disproportionately greater effects on species than changes to the mean, much of climate change research in ecology has focused on the impacts of mean temperature...
Article
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Effective spatial management in the ocean requires a network of conservation areas that are connected by larval and adult dispersal. We propose a conceptual framework for including the likely impacts of a changing climate on marine connectivity, and synthesize information on the relationships between changing ocean temperature and acidification, co...