1. Heatwaves are a growing threat to marine ecosystems. Kelps are particularly vulnerable because they require cool, nutrient-rich water to thrive. Heatwave conditions can also …
Applications of machine learning in ecology are rapidly expanding. Symbolic regression is gaining particular attention for its success in reverse-engineering human-readable …
The proportion of individuals that are found to have empty stomachs during a survey of a predator population’s diet has been used as an indicator of the average individual’s state …
Rocky reef kelp forests can exhibit abrupt shifts between forested and barren states where unchecked sea urchin grazing inhibits kelp recovery. Forefront to urchin barren …
Ecologists differ in the degree to which they consider the linear Type I functional response to be an unrealistic versus sufficient representation of predator feeding rates. …
Many critical drivers of ecological systems exhibit regular scaling relationships, yet, often, the underlying mechanisms explaining these relationships are unknown. Trophic …
Identifying species with disproportionate effects on other species under press perturbations is essential, yet how species traits drive their keystone-ness and how this depends on …
The relationship between infection prevalence and host age is informative because it can reveal processes underlying disease dynamics. Most prior work has assumed that …
Due to an error in our formulation of the citardauq solution to quadratic equations, our reformulation of the Steady State Saturation (SSS) model of Jeschke et al. (2002) to a …
Historical resurveys of ecological communities are important for placing the structure of modern ecosystems in context. Rarely, however, are surveys alone sufficient for providing …
Predator feeding rates (described by their functional response) must saturate at high prey densities. Although thousands of manipulative functional response experiments show …
Understanding coexistence within community modules such as intraguild predation (IGP), where an omnivore both preys on and competes with an intermediate consumer for a shared …
The factors that determine why ecosystems exhibit abrupt shifts in state are of paramount importance for management, conservation, and restoration efforts. Kelp forests are …
While the use of networks to understand how complex systems respond to perturbations is pervasive across scientific disciplines, the uncertainty associated with estimates of …
Collective behaviour is common in bacteria, plants, and animals, and thus across ecosystems, from biofilms to cities. With collective behaviour, social interactions among …
Stable isotopes are increasingly being used to unlock the wealth of information contained in specimens preserved in museum collections. However, preservation methods that employ …
The assessment of relative model performance using information criteria like AIC and BIC has become routine among functional-response studies, reflecting trends in the broader …
Although parasites are increasingly recognized for their ecosystem roles, it is often assumed that free-living organisms dominate animal biomass in most ecosystems and therefore …
Functional responses are a cornerstone to our understanding of consumer-resource interactions, so how to best describe them using models has been actively debated. Here we focus on …
Theory suggests that intraspecific trait variation will alter species interaction strengths through nonlinear averaging when interaction strengths are nonlinear functions of …
Functional responses relate a consumer's feeding rates to variation in its abiotic and biotic environment, providing insight into consumer behaviour and fitness, and underpinning …
Intraspecific variation is increasingly recognized as an important factor in ecological interactions that can exceed the role of interspecific variation. Few studies, however, …
Successfully predicting the future states of systems that are complex, stochastic, and potentially chaotic is a major challenge. Model forecasting error (FE) is the usual measure …
Despite progressive policies and continued advances in ocean management, numerous shifts associated with global changes have been observed in marine ecosystems in recent years, …
To support conservation practices, societal demand for understanding fundamental coastal ocean ecosystem mechanisms has grown in recent decades. Globally, these regions are among …
As the reality of climate change became obvious during the late 1900s, the need for understanding ecosystem pattern and dynamics at large scales and for long periods became …
Species interactions in food webs are usually recognized as dynamic, varying across species, space, and time because of biotic and abiotic drivers. Yet food webs also show …
A major goal of the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) has been to understand the impacts of climate change and variability on the coastal …
Describing the mechanisms that drive variation in species interaction strengths is central to understanding, predicting, and managing community dynamics. Multiple factors have been …
We consider the goal of predicting how complex networks respond to chronic (press) perturbations when characterizations of their network topology and interaction strengths are …
Estimates of predator feeding rates are important for understanding trophic dynamics. One common method for quantifying feeding rates in fishes combines mass‐based diet data with …
Intraspecific variation in ecologically relevant traits is widespread. In generalist predators in particular, individual diet specialization is likely to have important …
One of the twenty-first century’s greatest environmental challenges is to recover and restore species, habitats and ecosystems. The decision about how to initiate restoration is …
A long‐standing debate concerns how functional responses are best described. Theory suggests that ratio dependence is consistent with many food web patterns left unexplained by …
As the contribution for long-term ecological and environmental studies (LTEES) to our understanding of how species and ecosystems respond to a changing global climate becomes more …
In diverse tropical webs, trophic cascades are presumed to be rare, as species interactions may dampen top-down control and reduce their prevalence. To test this hypothesis, we …
Considerable effort has been devoted to the estimation of species interaction strengths. This effort has focused primarily on statistical significance testing and obtaining point …
Kelp forests (Order Laminariales) form key biogenic habitats in coastal regions of temperate and Arctic seas worldwide, providing ecosystem services valued in the range of …
Habitat loss, overexploitation, and numerous other stressors have caused global declines in apex predators. This “trophic downgrading” has generated widespread concern because of …
All ecosystems are subjected to chronic disturbances, such as harvest, pollution, and climate change. The capacity to forecast how species respond to such press perturbations is …
The community matrix is among ecology's most important mathematical abstractions, formally encapsulating the interconnected network of effects that species have on one another's …
Knowing how time is distributed within a fossil record is fundamental to paleobiology. Many efforts to quantify temporal resolution have estimated rates of specimen decay from the …
Many populations consist of individuals that differ substantially in their diets. Quantification of the magnitude and temporal consistency of such intraspecific diet variation is …
Much of the focus in evolutionary biology has been on the adaptive differentiation among organisms. It is equally important to understand the processes that result in similarities …
Ecological network models and analyses are recognized as valuable tools for understanding the dynamics and resiliency of ecosystems, and for informing ecosystem-based approaches …
Intraguild predation theory centres on two predictions: (i) for an omnivore and an intermediate predator (IG-prey) to coexist on shared resources, the IG-prey must be the superior …
San Nicolas Island is surrounded by broad areas of shallow subtidal habitat, characterized by dynamic kelp forest communities that undergo dramatic and abrupt shifts in community …
Predators sometimes provide biotic resistance against invasions by nonnative prey. Understanding and predicting the strength of biotic resistance remains a key challenge in …
Studies of consumer‐resource interactions suggest that individual diet specialisation is empirically widespread and theoretically important to the organisation and dynamics of …
Patterns of species interactions affect the dynamics of food webs. An important component of species interactions that is rarely considered with respect to food webs is the …
Natural populations consist of phenotypically diverse individuals that exhibit variation in their demographic parameters and intra- and inter-specific interactions. Recent …
A key assumption of the ideal free distribution (IFD) is that there are no costs in moving between habitat patches. However, because many populations exhibit more or less …
How best to predict the effects of perturbations to ecological communities has been a long‐standing goal for both applied and basic ecology. This quest has recently been revived …
Many factors contribute to the nonrandom processes of extinctions and invasions that are changing the structure of ecological communities worldwide. These factors include the …
Bayesian mixing models have allowed for the inclusion of uncertainty and prior information in the analysis of trophic interactions using stable isotopes. Formulating prior …
Over the past 7 years, several authors have used the approach of generalized modeling to study the dynamics of food chains and food webs. Generalized models come close to the …
Few methods for demonstrating the effects of species interactions rival that of the manipulative experiment (Kareiva and Levin 2002). The now commonly performed removal or …
The complexity of food webs poses a significant hurdle for our growing understanding of the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. Empirical methods that measure the …
Ecological surprises, substantial and unanticipated changes in the abundance of one or more species that result from previously unsuspected processes, are a common outcome of both …
Efforts to estimate the strength of species interactions in species‐rich, reticulate food webs have been hampered by the multitude of direct and indirect interactions such systems …
The patterns of diel activity of four large decapod species in the shallow subtidal of the Isles of Shoals, Gulf of Maine, U.S.A. were investigated. During the summer of 1999 the …