Characterizing how sympatric species influence each other's behavior, activity patterns, and habitat selection is central to wildlife ecology and conservation. Animals display behaviors like resource exclusion, competitor evasion, or attraction to prey or safety, resulting in observable patterns of attraction or avoidance. Spatiotemporal avoidance–attraction ratios (AARs) based on the time intervals

An understanding of mechanisms that influence biogeographical patterns can play a pivotal role in deciphering the intricate dynamics underlying species distributions and, ultimately, biodiversity patterns. Biodiversity composition results from both evolutionary origins and contemporary processes. However, how this combination jointly shapes biodiversity patterns and operates through mechanistic links

The theory about reproductive trade‐offs suggests that as reproduction is costly, individuals should trade current reproduction against future reproduction or survival, leading to within‐individual negative covariation between current reproduction and future performance. Despite clear predictions at the individual level, within‐individual negative covariations do not always translate into negative

COVER PHOTO: The cover image shows a Blackburnian Warbler as it takes flight. Blackburnian Warblers are one of hundreds of species of birds that migrate at night through the Central Flyway in the Great Plains of the United States. Using weather surveillance radar to track the timing of these migrations, Adams et al. (Ecology, Volume 106, Issue 5, Article e70110; doi:10.1002/ecy.70110) found that migration

Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) have strong effects on plant community diversity and composition, but we know less about how the abiotic environment alters PSFs. In the context of the stress‐gradient hypothesis (SGH), we predicted less negative PSFs in alpine versus prairie systems and tested this with three alpine and four prairie species and soil from three elevational gradients in western Montana, USA

The abundance of many Caribbean corals has declined over the past few decades, yet now Porites astreoides is more common on many shallow reefs than in the 1980s and shows evidence of local adaptation. We compare the small‐scale (1–8000 m) genetic structure of this brooding species and the broadcasting coral Orbicella annularis on reefs (<14 m depth) in St. John, US Virgin Islands, to examine how larval

In the spirit of so‐called “sightability models” for estimating population abundance, we developed a Bayesian hierarchical model that combines survey counts for animals (or plants) and a separate data set for detection to account for individuals that were missed during surveys. Our case study consisted of harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardii) aerial survey counts from 1996 to 2023 for the Prince William

Precipitation fluctuations strongly influence biomass production and its stability of terrestrial ecosystems. However, our understanding of the extent to which plant communities adjust their water‐use strategies in response to non‐growing season precipitation variations remains limited. Our 5‐year snow manipulation experiment in a semi‐arid grassland, complemented with paired stable isotope measurements

Tropical ecosystems contain the world's largest biodiversity of vascular plants. Yet, our understanding of tropical functional diversity and its contribution to global diversity patterns is constrained by data availability. This discrepancy underscores an urgent need to bridge data gaps by incorporating comprehensive tropical root data into global datasets. Here, we provide a database of tropical root

Several factors are known to affect bird migration timing, but no study has simultaneously compared the effects of temperature, land surface phenology, vegetation greenness, and relative humidity in both spring and fall. In addition, it is unclear whether long‐term shifts in migration phenologies have kept pace with changing climates. For example, if migration shifts earlier in the spring, temperatures

Life‐history variation can contribute to the long‐term persistence of populations; however, it remains unclear which environmental factors drive life‐history variation within a population. Seasonally recurring resource subsidies are common in nature and may influence variations in recipient consumers' life‐history traits. In this study, we experimentally demonstrated that terrestrial invertebrate subsidies

Global hydrological cycles are shifting due to climate change, and projected increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events will likely affect essential ecosystem processes driven by climate, such as forest decomposition. Our objective was to determine the effects of drought and intense rainfall on leaf litter and wood decomposition rates. We used a precipitation manipulation

Ecological communities under extreme environments are shaped by a balance of environmental filtering and coexistence mechanisms that result in a series of assembly rules. Although there is abundant evidence about the importance of these community assembly mechanisms in plants, their effects have been seldom compared for animals. We assess their relative importance for the temporal and spatial responses

Anthropogenic climate change, particularly changes in temperature and precipitation, affects plants in multiple ways. Because plants respond dynamically to stress and acclimate to changes in growing conditions, diagnosing quantitative plant‐environment relationships is a major challenge. One approach to this problem is to quantify leaf responses using spectral reflectance, which provides rapid, inexpensive

Earthworms are key organisms in terrestrial ecosystems. They are found globally and provide significant ecological functions and ecosystem services, so their conservation should be a priority. Yet little is known about the large‐scale impacts of global change on earthworm diversity, species distribution, and assemblage structure. More importantly, there are no comprehensive data on changes over long

Occupancy models estimate a species' occupancy probability while accounting for imperfect detection, but often overlook the issue of false‐positive detections. This problem of false positives has gained attention recently with the rapid advancement of automated species detection tools using artificial intelligence (AI), which generate continuous confidence scores for each species detection. Novel occupancy

Monitoring wildlife populations through the collection of abundance and distribution data across climatic seasons and multiple years is critical to understanding wildlife spatiotemporal dynamics. This is especially important in landscapes faced with natural and anthropogenic disturbances, which include the state of Rhode Island, USA. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the United

Most work on source‐sink dynamics in metacommunities assumes that species have minimal or no niche overlap and thus different sources and sinks. We explore the alternative possibility: competing species have an overlapping set of sources and sinks. Using both implicit‐space two‐patch (ordinary differential equations) and explicit‐space reaction–diffusion (partial differential equations) models, we

The study of assembly patterns and dynamics of organisms has long remained a foundational theme in ecology. Further, the relationship between assemblages and different habitats can provide important insight into ecological processes and guide management and conservation efforts (e.g., restoration, protected areas). We conducted underwater visual surveys of reef‐fish assemblages at 14 sites in the eastern

Pollinator declines pose a threat to ecosystems and food production. Agriculture contributes to, but also suffers from, the erosion of pollination services. Our study explores the potential of trees in agricultural landscapes to support pollinators by providing floral resources. Our overarching objective is the quantification of floral resources produced by wild cherry (Prunus avium L.) that can be

Large carnivores can influence smaller scavengers through both positive and negative interactions (e.g., carrion provisioning and intraguild killing) and ultimately shape scavenging efficiency. However, we know little about this trade‐off in anthropogenic landscapes where humans kill carnivores and provide carrion subsidies. In the context of wolf (Canis lupus) recolonization of human‐impacted landscapes

Biodiversity loss poses a significant threat to ecosystem functioning. However, much of the empirical evidence for these effects is based on artificial experiments that often fail to simulate the structure of natural communities. Hence, it is still unclear whether natural diversity losses would significantly affect the functioning of “real‐world” ecosystems. As subordinate and rare species constitute

Adjusting relative allocation between sexual and clonal reproduction is part of how plants respond to a variable environment, but we know little about how the allocation strategies of plant populations vary over time as abiotic conditions change. We studied correlations between sexual and clonal reproduction using 23 years of data on the clonal salt marsh plant Spartina alterniflora at eight sites

Over the past few decades, studies on empirical ecological networks have primarily focused on single antagonistic or mutualistic interactions. However, many species engage in multiple interactions that support distinct ecosystem functions. The architecture of networks integrating these interactions, along with their cascading effects on community dynamics, remains underexplored in ecological research

COVER PHOTO: The cover image shows an adult click beetle, Agrypnus murinus, a species common in grasslands of the northern hemisphere, sitting on a blade of grass. The photo was taken in May 2022 at the Jena Experiment field site, a long‐term grassland biodiversity experiment. This beetle is one of many arthropods featured by Bröcher et al. (Ecology, Volume 106, Issue 4, Article e70077; doi:10.1002/ecy

The competitive effect of one individual on another can have impacts beyond just reductions in performance. Because species plastically respond to their environment, competition can also induce changes in species traits, and in turn, these modified traits can then affect interactions with yet other individuals. In this context, plasticity is often argued to favor species coexistence by increasing the

Integral projection models (IPMs) are widely used for studying continuously size‐structured populations. IPMs require a growth sub‐model that describes the probability of future size conditional on current size and any covariates. Most IPM studies assume that this distribution is Gaussian, despite calls for non‐Gaussian models that accommodate skewness and excess kurtosis. We provide a general workflow

Over the past half century, international trade and exchange have continued to increase in China, resulting in the widespread introduction of alien plant species. The accumulation of these alien species has accelerated invasion events, posing serious threats to local ecological security and economic development. Comprehensive and accurate species distribution records are extremely important for early

Cryptic species (evolutionarily distinct lineages that do not align with morphologically defined species) are being increasingly discovered but are poorly integrated into ecological theory. In particular, we still lack a useful understanding of if and how cryptic species differ in ways that affect community recovery from disturbances and responses to anthropogenic stressors, such as the removal of

Lianas, woody vines acting as structural parasites of trees, have profound effects on the composition and structure of tropical forests, impacting tree growth, mortality, and forest succession. Remote sensing could offer a powerful tool for quantifying the scale of liana infestation, provided the availability of robust detection methods. We analyze the consistency and global geographic specificity

For decades, community ecologists have examined how diversity varies with ecosystem productivity. Despite this long history, tests of hypothesized mechanisms, namely the interplay between environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and dispersal, are lacking, largely due to the intractability of using traditional approaches. Across a productivity gradient in a serpentine grassland (California, USA)

Arthropods play an important role in grasslands, making trait‐based research a valuable approach to advance our understanding of ecosystem functioning. However, a wide range of functional traits for complex arthropod communities is often not available in a single source but must be compiled from multiple references and databases. Using suction and pitfall sampling in the field site of the Jena Experiment

Stream biogeochemical regimes can vary over short distances in heterogenous landscapes. In many mountainous and high‐latitude watersheds, streams fed by rain and groundwater sources coexist with streams dominated by meltwater from melting glaciers, permafrost, and seasonal snowpack. The distinct physicochemical regimes of meltwater and non‐meltwater fed streams can promote spatial and temporal asynchronies

Invasive species have become a major threat to ecosystems across the globe, causing significant ecological and economic damage. To anticipate how communities may respond to future invasions, it is crucial to refine how invader impacts are evaluated, especially in historically uninvaded and highly variable systems such as arid lands. While invader abundance is typically used to predict invader impacts

Trait‐based approaches to study biodiversity responses to changing environmental conditions have become popular because these approaches provide context to how and why certain taxa shift in abundance within an assemblage. Trait‐based approaches also offer the potential to link shifts in assemblage composition to effects on ecosystem functions like rates of primary production, detrital decomposition

Many animals track ephemeral peaks in food abundance and quality that propagate across landscapes. Migrating ungulates, in particular, track waves of newly emerging plants from low‐elevation winter ranges to high‐elevation summer ranges—known as “green‐wave surfing.” Because plants lose crude protein and gain insoluble fiber with maturation, ruminants are expected to exploit peaks in forage quality

Most plant species exhibit spatially clustered distributions. Theory suggests such conspecific aggregation can delay competitive exclusion by sparing weak competitors. However, the extent to which spatial aggregation increases species performance and which species are likely to benefit from it remain largely unknown. In this study, we asked (1) whether spatial aggregation enhances plant performance

Seminal hypotheses in ecology and evolution postulate that stronger and more specialized biotic interactions contribute to higher species diversity at lower elevations and latitudes. Plant‐chemical defenses mediate biotic interactions between plants and their natural enemies and provide a highly dimensional trait space in which chemically mediated niches may facilitate plant species coexistence. However

Acid rain, with 60% deposition in Asia, may exacerbate plant phosphorus (P) limitation; however, its long‐term effects on different plant life‐forms remain largely undetermined. Understanding these effects is essential for predicting ecosystem resilience and promoting forest health under environmental change. Herein, we investigated the P status in two tree and two herb species and their rhizosphere

Year‐to‐year variation in seed crop size (i.e., masting) varies strongly among populations of the same species. Understanding what causes this variation is vital, as masting affects the ability of tree species to regenerate and determines the population dynamics of a wide variety of animals. It is commonly thought that environmental stress is a key driver of masting variability. The environmental stress

Spatial confinement to a home range is theorized to be a more energetically efficient method of acquiring resources than random searching due to spatial memory. Intraspecific studies that have compared home range size at different population densities have found that home ranges shrink as population density increases. This negative trend could be due to increased conspecific competition via population

Soil microorganisms play outsized roles in nutrient cycling, plant health, and climate regulation. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of how soil microbes are affected by habitat fragmentation, including their responses to conditions at fragment edges, or “edge effects.” To understand the responses of soil communities to edge effects, we analyzed the distributions of soil bacteria

This study provides a pioneering analysis of the structural and topological characteristics of one of nature's simplest food webs, using the Montaña Clara islet (Canary Islands) as a case study. Applying a multilayer network approach, which assesses multiple interaction types, we examined plant–animal and plant‐fungi interactions during two seasons (humid and dry), comparing this oceanic island food

COVER PHOTO: The cover image, photographed in February 2020, depicts flamingos and palm trees along the lakeshore of Lake Mamka, a shallow alkaline lake in Tanzania. The lake, characterized by a pH of 9.93 and salinity of 85,318 ppm, provides a unique habitat for extremophile microorganisms. Ren et al. (Ecology, Volume 106, Issue 3, Article e70047; doi:10.1002/ecy.70047) investigate traits linked to

Global nitrogen (N) enrichment is modifying microbial interactions, which can be represented by network complexity. While a number of studies have explored how N addition influences the microbial intra‐trophic network, its effects on the inter‐trophic network have rarely been investigated. Here, we examined the effects of 8 years of multilevel N additions (i.e., 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 g N m−2

Rising temperatures negatively affect bumble bee fitness directly through physiological impacts and indirectly by disrupting mutualistic interactions between bees and other organisms, which are crucial in determining species‐specific responses to climate change. Gut microbial symbionts, key regulators of host nutrition and health, may be the Achilles' heel of thermal responses in insects. They not