Conservation futures 2050: Developing future scenarios to explore potential socio-economic developments and their impact on biodiversity.

Large scale changes in biodiversity and conservation management require long-term goals and planning across multiple sectors in the face of increasing global change. Major trends in land use and management interventions, species additions or losses, and climate are well recognized, but responses are still often short-term and fragmented across agencies and sectors. Scenario-building can be a powerful tool to imagine possible futures, integrating across sectors and disciplines and promoting long-term thinking and planning.

Exploring freshwater stream bacterial communities as indicators of land use intensity.

Background: Stream ecosystems comprise complex interactions among biological communities and their physicochemical surroundings, contributing to their overall ecological health. Despite this, many monitoring programs ignore changes in the bacterial communities that are the base of food webs in streams, often focusing on stream physicochemical assessments or macroinvertebrate community diversity instead. We used 16S rRNA gene sequencing to assess bacterial community compositions within 600 New Zealand stream biofilm samples from 204 sites within a 6-week period (February-March 2010).

Soil bacterial community composition is more stable in kiwifruit orchards relative to phyllosphere communities over time.

Background: Soil and phyllosphere (leaves and fruit) microbes play critical roles in the productivity and health of crops. However, microbial community dynamics are currently understudied in orchards, with a limited number incorporating temporal monitoring. We used 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to investigate bacterial community temporal dynamics and community assembly processes on the leaves and fruit, and in the soil of 12 kiwifruit orchards across a cropping season in New Zealand.

The soil microbiome: An essential, but neglected, component of regenerative agroecosystems.

Regenerative agriculture (RA) is gaining traction globally as an approach for meeting growing food demands while avoiding, or even remediating, the detrimental environmental consequences associated with conventional farming. Momentum is building for science to provide evidence for, or against, the putative ecosystem benefits of RA practices relative to conventional farming. In this perspective article, we advance the argument that consideration of the soil microbiome in RA research is crucial for disentangling the varied and complex relationships RA practices have with the biotic and abiotic environment, outline the expected changes in soil microbiomes under RA, and make recommendations for designing research that will answer the outstanding questions on the soil microbiome under RA.

Land-use history impacts spatial patterns and composition of woody plant species across a 35-hectare temperate forest plot.

Land-use history is the template upon which contemporary plant and tree populations establish and interact with one another and exerts a legacy on the structure and dynamics of species assemblages and ecosystems. We use the first census (2010-2014) of a 35-ha forest-dynamics plot at the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts to describe the composition and structure of the woody plants in this plot, assess their spatial associations within and among the dominant species using univariate and bivariate spatial point-pattern analysis, and examine the interactions between land-use history and ecological processes. The plot includes 108,632 live stems ≥ 1 cm in diameter (2,215 individuals/ha) and 7,595 standing dead stems ≥ 5 cm in diameter.

High light-induced photoinhibition is not limiting seedling establishment at abrupt treeline ecotones in New Zealand.

Seedlings of New Zealand's treeline-forming Fuscospora cliffortioides (Hook.f.) perform poorly beyond the established canopy, limiting treeline advance.

Changes in the analysis of temporal community dynamics data: a 29-year literature review.

Background: Understanding how biological communities change over time is of increasing importance as Earth moves into the Anthropocene. A wide variety of methods are used for multivariate community analysis and are variously applied to research that aims to characterise temporal dynamics in community composition. Understanding these methods and how they are applied is useful for determining best practice in community ecology.

Measuring change in biological communities: multivariate analysis approaches for temporal datasets with low sample size.

Effective and robust ways to describe, quantify, analyse, and test for change in the structure of biological communities over time are essential if ecological research is to contribute substantively towards understanding and managing responses to ongoing environmental changes. Structural changes reflect population dynamics, changes in biomass and relative abundances of taxa, and colonisation and extinction events observed in samples collected through time. Most previous studies of temporal changes in the multivariate datasets that characterise biological communities are based on short time series that are not amenable to data-hungry methods such as multivariate generalised linear models.

Using soil bacterial communities to predict physico-chemical variables and soil quality.

Background: Soil ecosystems consist of complex interactions between biological communities and physico-chemical variables, all of which contribute to the overall quality of soils. Despite this, changes in bacterial communities are ignored by most soil monitoring programs, which are crucial to ensure the sustainability of land management practices. We applied 16S rRNA gene sequencing to determine the bacterial community composition of over 3000 soil samples from 606 sites in New Zealand.

Connecting through space and time: catchment-scale distributions of bacteria in soil, stream water and sediment.

Terrestrial and aquatic environments are linked through hydrological networks that transport abiotic components from upslope environments into aquatic ecosystems. However, our understanding of how bacteria are transported through these same networks is limited. Here, we applied 16S rRNA gene sequencing to over 500 soil, stream water and stream sediment samples collected within a native forest catchment to determine the extent to which bacterial communities in these habitats are connected.

Following Rapoport's Rule: the geographic range and genome size of bacterial taxa decline at warmer latitudes.

We sought to test whether stream bacterial communities conform to Rapoport's Rule, a pattern commonly observed for plants and animals whereby taxa exhibit decreased latitudinal range sizes closer to the equator. Using a DNA sequencing approach, we explored the biogeography of biofilm bacterial communities in 204 streams across a ∼1000 km latitudinal gradient. The range sizes of bacterial taxa were strongly correlated with latitude, decreasing closer to the equator, which coincided with a greater than fivefold increase in bacterial taxonomic richness.

Increased stem density and competition may diminish the positive effects of warming at alpine treeline.

The most widespread response to global warming among alpine treeline ecotones is not an upward shift, but an increase in tree density. However, the impact of increasing density on interactions among trees at treeline is not well understood. Here, we test if treeline densification induced by climatic warming leads to increasing intraspecific competition.

Bacteria as Emerging Indicators of Soil Condition.

Unlabelled: Bacterial communities are important for the health and productivity of soil ecosystems and have great potential as novel indicators of environmental perturbations. To assess how they are affected by anthropogenic activity and to determine their ability to provide alternative metrics of environmental health, we sought to define which soil variables bacteria respond to across multiple soil types and land uses. We determined, through 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, the composition of bacterial communities in soil samples from 110 natural or human-impacted sites, located up to 300 km apart.

Using codispersion analysis to quantify and understand spatial patterns in species-environment relationships.

The analysis of spatial patterns in species-environment relationships can provide new insights into the niche requirements and potential co-occurrence of species, but species abundance and environmental data are routinely collected at different spatial scales. Here, we investigate the use of codispersion analysis to measure and assess the scale, directionality and significance of complex relationships between plants and their environment in large forest plots. We applied codispersion analysis to both simulated and field data on spatially located tree species basal area and environmental variables.

Using codispersion analysis to characterize spatial patterns in species co-occurrences.

Visualizing and quantifying spatial patterns of co-occurrence (i.e., of two or more species, or of species and underlying environmental variables) can suggest hypotheses about processes that structure species assemblages and their relevant spatial scales.

Can ecosystem-scale translocations mitigate the impact of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity? Promises, pitfalls, and possibilities: Ecosystem-scale translocations.

Because ecological interactions are the first components of the ecosystem to be impacted by climate change, future forms of threatened-species and ecosystem management should aim at conserving complete, functioning communities rather than single charismatic species. A possible way forward is the deployment of ecosystem-scale translocation (EST), where above- and below-ground elements of a functioning terrestrial ecosystem (including vegetation and topsoil) are carefully collected and moved together. Small-scale attempts at such practice have been made for the purpose of ecological restoration.

Local-scale topoclimate effects on treeline elevations: a country-wide investigation of New Zealand's southern beech treelines.

Although treeline elevations are limited globally by growing season temperature, at regional scales treelines frequently deviate below their climatic limit. The cause of these deviations relate to a host of climatic, disturbance, and geomorphic factors that operate at multiple scales. The ability to disentangle the relative effects of these factors is currently hampered by the lack of reliable topoclimatic data, which describe how regional climatic characteristics are modified by topographic effects in mountain areas.

Fine-scale spatial patterns in bacterial community composition and function within freshwater ponds.

The extent to which non-host-associated bacterial communities exhibit small-scale biogeographic patterns in their distribution remains unclear. Our investigation of biogeography in bacterial community composition and function compared samples collected across a smaller spatial scale than most previous studies conducted in freshwater. Using a grid-based sampling design, we abstracted 100+ samples located between 3.