Community ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human encroachment into nature alters species communities and can lead to changes in disease dynamics. Here, Meyer et al. find that coronavirus prevalence increased in less diverse bat communities, which were dominated by susceptible host species.

    • Magdalena Meyer
    • , Dominik W. Melville
    •  & Simone Sommer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intraspecific trait variation could influence competitive interactions among species. Here, the authors show that higher intraspecific variation in seedling traits and performance may enable competitively inferior plant species to coexist with competitively superior species.

    • Jing Yang
    • , Xiya Wang
    •  & Guochun Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global biogeographic patterns have resulted from millions of years of evolution. Here, the authors show that the global dispersal of non-native ant species is rapidly redefining these biogeographic patterns by homogenizing species assemblages, disproportionally affecting tropical regions and islands.

    • Lucie Aulus-Giacosa
    • , Sébastien Ollier
    •  & Cleo Bertelsmeier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change is shifting species distribution globally. Here, the authors track four decades of changes in the thermal affinity of 1,817 marine species across European seas, showing that most communities have responded to ongoing ocean warming via increases of warm-water species or decreases of cold-water species.

    • Guillem Chust
    • , Ernesto Villarino
    •  & Martin Lindegren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Species-rich plant communities often have higher productivity than monocultures. Here, the authors analyse biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments in grasslands and forests and find that the biodiversity effects on community productivity strengthen over time thanks to shifts in contributions of species with different resource acquisition traits.

    • Liting Zheng
    • , Kathryn E. Barry
    •  & Yann Hautier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Predicting species responses to climate change may be complicated by the influence of other factors. Here, the authors report that warming is linked to terrestrial and freshwater community shifts towards warm-adapted species overall, but body size, thermal niche breadth, species richness and baseline temperature modulate the trends.

    • Imran Khaliq
    • , Christian Rixen
    •  & Anita Narwani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Protected areas are meant to defend species from direct exploitation and habitat loss, but they might also reduce climate change impacts. Here, the authors show that marine protected areas mitigate the impacts of marine heatwaves on reef fish communities.

    • Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi
    • , Amanda E. Bates
    •  & Eneko Aspillaga

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies showed that humans are causing species to become more active at night. Here the authors show that this trend is not consistent across hyperdiverse wildlife communities, as camera trap surveys in Southeast Asia show that responses depend on species traits and do not affect the temporal overlap of biotic interactions.

    • Samuel Xin Tham Lee
    • , Zachary Amir
    •  & Matthew Scott Luskin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although co-occurring species may differ widely in their response traits, coordinated functional trait shifts may emerge at the community level in response to environmental factors. Here, the authors use data from 150 grassland sites to identify a coordinated slow-fast strategy response to land-use intensification across above- and belowground taxa.

    • Margot Neyret
    • , Gaëtane Le Provost
    •  & Peter Manning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using a global synthesis of size spectra data from pelagic food webs, this study finds that size structure is not driven by temperature as often suggested, but by the nutrient status of the system. This means that modest phytoplankton declines projected for key fishing grounds at mid-latitudes will amplify into substantial reductions in the supportable biomass of fish.

    • Angus Atkinson
    • , Axel G. Rossberg
    •  & Constantin Frangoulis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change is redistributing species poleward, threatening widespread socio-ecological disruption as key tipping-points are exceeded. This study examines space-time dynamics of kelp ecosystem collapse over a 15-year period along the warming coastline of eastern Tasmania and shows that an early-warning signal of kelp ecosystem collapse is recognisable well-in-advance.

    • Scott D. Ling
    •  & John P. Keane

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although intraspecific dominance hierarchies are common, large scale interspecific dominance hierarchies are unknown. Using data from hundreds of avian species, the authors find that species that are more familiar with each other engage in less aggression and the aggression is resolved more directly.

    • Gavin M. Leighton
    • , Jonathan P. Drury
    •  & Eliot T. Miller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Body colour may be an important factor in insect phenology. Here, the authors show that colour lightness of dragonfly assemblages from the UK, collected between May and October from 1990-2020, varies in response to seasonal changes in solar radiation, suggesting a link between colour-based thermoregulation and insect phenology.

    • Roberto Novella-Fernandez
    • , Roland Brandl
    •  & Christian Hof

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest responses can have major effects on tree architecture and community structure near the edges of forest fragments. Here, using terrestrial LiDAR scanning data from long-term forest plots, the authors find a net negative effect of fragmentation on Amazonian Forest aboveground biomass.

    • Matheus Henrique Nunes
    • , Marcel Caritá Vaz
    •  & Eduardo Eiji Maeda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Free-ranging domestic cats have major ecological impacts globally. Here, Lepczyk et al. compile records of the species consumed by cats, identifying thousands of species consumed, including hundreds of species that are of conservation concern.

    • Christopher A. Lepczyk
    • , Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk
    •  & John C. Z. Woinarski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ecosystem services provided by dung beetles are an underappreciated component of terrestrial ecosystems. Here, the authors report a standardized distributed experiment which shows that dung removal rate, a key ecosystem process in pastures, is greater under high beetle functional diversity regardless of grazing intensity.

    • Jorge Ari Noriega
    • , Joaquín Hortal
    •  & Ana M. C. Santos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anthropogenic eutrophication is a driver of plant community shifts in many grassland ecosystems. Here, the authors use data from a globally distributed experiment to assess how nutrient addition affects multiple facets of grassland ecological stability and their correlations.

    • Qingqing Chen
    • , Shaopeng Wang
    •  & Yann Hautier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While speciation rates vary across regions, the causes of this disparity and its impact on biodiversity patterns still puzzle scientists. Studying South American fish speciation, Cerezer et al. uncover key associations of body size evolution—especially rapid changes in uplands—with accelerated speciation.

    • Felipe O. Cerezer
    • , Cristian S. Dambros
    •  & Catherine H. Graham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Colonizer establishment produces fundamental building blocks that shape the structure of assembling pollination networks. In this model, while colonizers leverage indirect competition to establish, adaptive foraging by pollinators maintains species coexistence which produces nested networks.

    • Sabine Dritz
    • , Rebecca A. Nelson
    •  & Fernanda S. Valdovinos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mammalian megafaunal biodiversity has declined since the Plio-Pleistocene. Here, the authors apply ecometric methods to evaluate the functional link between eastern African herbivorous megafauna and their environments, showing that some biodiversity loss coincided with community ecological function disturbance.

    • Daniel A. Lauer
    • , A. Michelle Lawing
    •  & Jenny L. McGuire

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Seed banks are reservoirs of plant diversity. This study shows that nutrient addition decreases diversity of grassland seed banks, increases their similarity to aboveground communities and interacts with aboveground herbivory to affect their abundance.

    • Anu Eskelinen
    • , Maria-Theresa Jessen
    •  & Lauren L. Sullivan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Keystone taxa in ecological communities are native taxa that have an especially important role in the stability of their ecosystem. This study introduces a novel method for detecting keystones in microbial communities by comparing data with and without specific species.

    • Guy Amit
    •  & Amir Bashan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drivers responsible for plant microbiome variation between sites remain elusive. Here, the authors test how soil nutrient addition and herbivore exclusion affect plant microbiota in grasslands worldwide, showing that microbiota diversity responded to environmental variation similarly across sites.

    • Eric W. Seabloom
    • , Maria C. Caldeira
    •  & Elizabeth T. Borer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Isolating the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in natural ecosystems is challenging. Here, the authors apply a causal inference approach to observational data from grasslands and find a negative effect of biodiversity on productivity driven by non-native and rare species.

    • Laura E. Dee
    • , Paul J. Ferraro
    •  & Michel Loreau

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study examines how the tropicalisation of shallow reefs changes functional niches for fishes in Japan and Australia. They discover that functional niches in tropical-temperate transitional communities are asynchronously invaded by tropical species, mediated more by habitat availability than competition with resident temperate species.

    • Mark G. R. Miller
    • , James D. Reimer
    •  & Maria Beger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenological shifts driven by climate change are well-studied in plants and aboveground animals, but scarcely in belowground biota. Here, the authors show that soil warming causes phenological mismatches between plants, soil microbes and soil microarthropods in an alpine meadow.

    • Rui Yin
    • , Wenkuan Qin
    •  & Biao Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Trees often associate with mycorrhizal fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) or ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi. Luo et al. analyze 74,563 forest plots across the contiguous USA, showing that forests with mixed AM and ECM tree species are more productive than when dominated by AM or ECM tree species.

    • Shan Luo
    • , Richard P. Phillips
    •  & Nico Eisenhauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modelling diverse ecological phenomena across scales with a single mathematical framework is challenging. Here, the authors draw on density functional theory to develop a framework that bridges between mechanistic theories at fine scales and statistical models at large scales.

    • Martin-I. Trappe
    •  & Ryan A. Chisholm

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contribution of animal ecosystem engineers to coastal geomorphological processes is often neglected. Here, the authors combine observational, experimental and modelling work to demonstrate that ecosystem engineering by mussels is a much stronger driver of salt marsh accretion rates than expected.

    • Sinéad M. Crotty
    • , Daniele Pinton
    •  & Christine Angelini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ungulate herbivory is an important driver of ecological change in forests. Here, the authors combine vegetation resurveys showing herbivory effects are highly dependent on soil eutrophication, promoting non-natives under high N-conditions, yet benefiting threatened species under low N-conditions.

    • Josiane Segar
    • , Henrique M. Pereira
    •  & Ingmar R. Staude

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multiple co-acting environmental pressures could affect ecosystems in ways not predictable based on single factors or pairwise combinations. Here, the authors show that the number of global change factors affects productivity, species composition and diversity of grassland plant communities.

    • Benedikt Speißer
    • , Rutger A. Wilschut
    •  & Mark van Kleunen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drivers of long-term trends in insect populations are usually inferred from space-for-time substitution studies rather than from time-series data. Here, the authors investigate insect trends across a 40-year period in Switzerland and test their linkages with climate change, land use change and their interactions.

    • Felix Neff
    • , Fränzi Korner-Nievergelt
    •  & Eva Knop

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant intraspecific diversity genetic diversity could affect also other trophic levels. This meta-analysis shows that increasing plant genetic diversity improves the performance of plants and natural enemies of herbivores, while decreasing the performance of plant antagonists.

    • Nian-Feng Wan
    • , Liwan Fu
    •  & Christoph Scherber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Temporal niche partitioning is an important feature of animal communities. Here, Vallejo-Vargas and colleagues analyze standardized camera trap survey data from protected areas across the tropics to investigate diel patterns of forest mammals in relation to body mass and trophic guild.

    • Andrea F. Vallejo-Vargas
    • , Douglas Sheil
    •  & Richard Bischof

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aquatic (blue) and terrestrial (green) food webs are part of the same landscape, but it remains unclear whether they respond similarly to shared environmental gradients. Using long-term monitoring data from Switzerland and a metaweb approach, this study reveals how inferred blue and green food webs exhibit different properties along an elevation gradient and among land-use types.

    • Hsi-Cheng Ho
    • , Jakob Brodersen
    •  & Florian Altermatt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    At a time when protecting the environment is urgent, dealing with inherent uncertainties in the responses of biodiversity to disturbances is essential. This study promotes a promising tool to assess the vulnerability of species assemblages to guide protection efforts even if species response and disturbance regimes are poorly documented.

    • Arnaud Auber
    • , Conor Waldock
    •  & David Mouillot

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