Community ecology articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    A 16-year dataset of abundance patterns of a diverse assemblage of bees in New Mexico, USA predicts declines for many bee species and indicates that drought-tolerant taxa will prevail in a warming and drying climate.

    • Melanie R. Kazenel
    • , Karen W. Wright
    •  & Jennifer A. Rudgers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An analysis of tree survival data from forest sites worldwide shows that in the tropics, rare tree species experience stronger stabilizing density dependence than common species, wheras no correlation of stabilizing density dependence and abundance exists in the temperate zone.

    • Lisa Hülsmann
    • , Ryan A. Chisholm
    •  & Florian Hartig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conversion of rainforest to plantations in Sumatra leads to higher energetic losses in animal food webs aboveground than belowground, with the belowground energy being reallocated from diverse arthropod communities to invasive earthworms.

    • Anton M. Potapov
    • , Jochen Drescher
    •  & Stefan Scheu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An analysis of more than 500 sites distributed worldwide finds that declines in the abundance of terrestrial insects are attributable mainly to decreases in species that were formerly abundant, rather than being the result of losses of rare species.

    • Roel van Klink
    • , Diana E. Bowler
    •  & Jonathan M. Chase

  • Article |

    A study that tracked mammal populations before, during and after a severe storm in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park finds that behavioural responses and survival are linked to body size, with increased mortality of small species owing to limited mobility and changes in food availability.

    • Reena H. Walker
    • , Matthew C. Hutchinson
    •  & Ryan A. Long

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Surveys of reef change are combined with a unique 20-year time series of land–sea human impacts and the results show that integrated land–sea management could help achieve coastal ocean conservation goals and provide coral reefs with the best opportunity to persist in our changing climate.

    • Jamison M. Gove
    • , Gareth J. Williams
    •  & Gregory P. Asner

  • Article |

    Analysis of Triton, a high-resolution dataset documenting the macroperforate planktonic foraminifera fossil record, reveals a global climate-linked equatorward shift of ecological and morphological community equitability over the past 8 million years.

    • Adam Woodhouse
    • , Anshuman Swain
    •  & Christopher M. Lowery

  • Article |

    Using a large-scale fishery dataset in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a pervasive pattern of increased pelagic predator catch inside anticyclonic eddies relative to cyclones and non-eddy areas is shown.

    • Martin C. Arostegui
    • , Peter Gaube
    •  & Camrin D. Braun

  • Article |

    Competition for pollinators weakens plant coexistence by destabilizing interactions between plant species; this is crucial for determining the effects of the decline in pollinators.

    • Christopher A. Johnson
    • , Proneet Dutt
    •  & Jonathan M. Levine

  • Article |

    Interactions between European bird and plant species show that fruiting period has a major effect on seed dispersal by migrating birds, which will influence plant adaptations to climate change through latitudinal dispersal.

    • Juan P. González-Varo
    • , Beatriz Rumeu
    •  & Anna Traveset

  • Article |

    Analysis of 123 studies of assemblage-level abundances of focal taxa from fragmented habitats finds that increasing fragmentation has a disproportionately large effect on biodiversity loss, supporting the ecosystem decay hypothesis.

    • Jonathan M. Chase
    • , Shane A. Blowes
    •  & Felix May

  • Article |

    Whole-ecosystem manipulations of Caribbean islands occupied by brown anoles, involving the addition of competitors (green anoles) and/or top predators (curly-tailed lizards), demonstrate that predator introductions can alter the ecological niches and destabilize the coexistence of competing prey species.

    • Robert M. Pringle
    • , Tyler R. Kartzinel
    •  & Rowan D. H. Barrett

  • Article |

    With global warming, Andean forests are changing to include more trees of low-elevation, heat-loving species but rates of compositional change are not uniform across elevations and are insufficient to keep species in equilibrium with climate.

    • Belén Fadrique
    • , Selene Báez
    •  & Kenneth J. Feeley

  • Letter |

    Species richness was found to increase temporal stability but decrease resistance to warming in an experiment involving 690 micro-ecosystems consisting of 1 to 6 species of bacterivorous ciliates that were sampled over 40 days.

    • Frank Pennekamp
    • , Mikael Pontarp
    •  & Owen L. Petchey

  • Article |

    Analyses of the relationships between temperature, moisture and seven key plant functional traits across the tundra and over time show that community height increased with warming across all sites, whereas other traits lagged behind predicted rates of change.

    • Anne D. Bjorkman
    • , Isla H. Myers-Smith
    •  & Evan Weiher

  • Letter |

    The urban-heat-island effect drives community-level shifts towards smaller body sizes; however, habitat fragmentation caused by urbanization favours larger body sizes in species with positive size–dispersal links.

    • Thomas Merckx
    • , Caroline Souffreau
    •  & Hans Van Dyck

  • Letter |

    The pollination service provided by nocturnal flower visitors is disrupted near streetlamps, which leads to a reduced reproductive output of the plant that cannot be compensated for by day-time pollinators; in addition, the structure of combined nocturnal and diurnal pollination networks facilitates the spread of the consequences of disrupted night-time pollination to daytime pollinators.

    • Eva Knop
    • , Leana Zoller
    •  & Colin Fontaine

  • Letter |

    A tree biodiversity and ecosystem function experiment shows that leaf bacterial diversity is positively related to plant community productivity, and explains a portion of the variation in productivity that would otherwise be attributed to plant diversity and functional traits.

    • Isabelle Laforest-Lapointe
    • , Alain Paquette
    •  & Steven W. Kembel

  • Letter |

    Removal of invasive exotic shrubs from mountaintop communities increased the number of pollinators and positively altered pollinator behaviour, which enhanced native fruit production, indicating that the degradation of ecosystem functions is partly reversible.

    • Christopher N. Kaiser-Bunbury
    • , James Mougal
    •  & Nico Blüthgen

  • Letter |

    Empirically validated mathematical models show that a combination of intraspecific competition between subterranean social-insect colonies and scale-dependent feedbacks between plants can explain the spatially periodic vegetation patterns observed in many landscapes, such as the Namib Desert ‘fairy circles’.

    • Corina E. Tarnita
    • , Juan A. Bonachela
    •  & Robert M. Pringle

  • Letter |

    Analysis of a large grassland biodiversity dataset shows that increases in local land-use intensity cause biotic homogenization at landscape scale across microbial, plant and animal groups, both above- and belowground, that is largely independent of changes in local diversity.

    • Martin M. Gossner
    • , Thomas M. Lewinsohn
    •  & Eric Allan

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Richard J. Telford
    • , Joseph D. Chipperfield
    •  & H. John B. Birks

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • S. Kathleen Lyons
    • , Joshua H. Miller
    •  & Nicholas J. Gotelli

  • Letter |

    Variation in plant nutrient levels suppresses insect herbivore populations and the homogenous nutrient content of modern agricultural crops could be contributing to insect pest outbreaks.

    • William C. Wetzel
    • , Heather M. Kharouba
    •  & Richard Karban

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • S. Kathleen Lyons
    • , Joshua H. Miller
    •  & Nicholas J. Gotelli

  • Article |

    An ambitious study has used more than 10,000 datasets to examine how the phenological characteristics—such as the timing of reproduction—of various taxa alter in response to climate change, and suggests that differing levels of climate sensitivity could lead to the desynchronization of seasonal events over time.

    • Stephen J. Thackeray
    • , Peter A. Henrys
    •  & Sarah Wanless

  • Letter |

    Historical assessment of nectar provision in the UK from the 1930s to 2007 shows an initial dramatic fall, but more recently nectar provision has increased; the diversity of nectar sources has fallen to the point that four species now produce half of the total UK nectar.

    • Mathilde Baude
    • , William E. Kunin
    •  & Jane Memmott

  • Letter |

    Data from millions of trees in thousands of locations are used to show that certain key traits affect competitive ability in predictable ways, and that there are trade-offs between traits that favour growth with and without competition.

    • Georges Kunstler
    • , Daniel Falster
    •  & Mark Westoby

  • Letter |

    Species’ range dynamics depend not only on their ability to track climate, but also on the migration of their competitors, and the extent to which novel and current competitors exert differing competitive effects.

    • Jake M. Alexander
    • , Jeffrey M. Diez
    •  & Jonathan M. Levine

  • Letter |

    Rare species may have an advantage in a community by suffering less from disease; here it is shown that, because pathogens are shared among species, it is not just the abundance of a particular species but the structure of the whole community that affects exposure to disease.

    • Ingrid M. Parker
    • , Megan Saunders
    •  & Gregory S. Gilbert

  • Article |

    Analysis of a global data set of local biodiversity comparisons reveals an average 13.6% reduction in species richness and 10.7% reduction in abundance as a result of past human land use, and projections based on these data under a business-as-usual land-use scenario predict further substantial loss this century, unless strong mitigation efforts are undertaken to reverse the effects.

    • Tim Newbold
    • , Lawrence N. Hudson
    •  & Andy Purvis

  • Letter |

    An analysis of 21 coral reefs in the Indian Ocean using data across 17 years that spanned a major climatic disturbance reveals factors that predispose a coral reef to recovery or regime shift from hard corals to macroalgae; these results could foreshadow the likely outcomes of tropical coral reefs to the effects of climate change, informing management and adaptation plans.

    • Nicholas A. J. Graham
    • , Simon Jennings
    •  & Shaun K. Wilson

  • Letter |

    Experimental data collected from 40 grasslands on 6 continents show that nutrients and herbivores can serve as counteracting forces to control local plant diversity; nutrient addition reduces local diversity through light limitation, and herbivory rescues diversity at sites where it alleviates light limitation.

    • Elizabeth T. Borer
    • , Eric W. Seabloom
    •  & Louie H. Yang

  • Letter |

    Suppressing fungi in a tropical forest plant community lowers diversity by reducing the negative effects of density on seedling recruitment, and removing insects increases seedling survival and alters plant community composition; this demonstrates the crucial role of pathogens and insects in maintaining and structuring tropical forest plant diversity.

    • Robert Bagchi
    • , Rachel E. Gallery
    •  & Owen T. Lewis

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