Accounting for effects of growth rate when measuring ecological stability in response to pulse perturbations.

Ecological stability is a vital component of natural ecosystems that can inform effective conservation and ecosystem management. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in making comparisons of stability values across sites, systems and taxonomic groups, often using comparative synthetic approaches, such as meta-analysis. However, these synthetic approaches often compare/contrast systems where measures of stability mean very different things to the taxa involved.

Elemental and biochemical nutrient limitation of zooplankton: A meta-analysis.

Primary consumers in aquatic ecosystems are frequently limited by the quality of their food, often expressed as phytoplankton elemental and biochemical composition. However, the effects of these food quality indicators vary across studies, and we lack an integrated understanding of how elemental (e.g.

Alternate patterns of temperature variation bring about very different disease outcomes at different mean temperatures.

The dynamics of host-parasite interactions are highly temperature-dependent and may be modified by increasing frequency and intensity of climate-driven heat events. Here, we show that altered patterns of temperature variance lead to an almost order-of-magnitude shift in thermal performance of host and pathogen life-history traits over and above the effects of mean temperature and, moreover, that different temperature regimes affect these traits differently. We found that diurnal fluctuations of ±3°C lowered infection rates and reduced spore burden compared to constant temperatures in our focal host exposed to the microsporidium parasite .

Meta-analysis on pulse disturbances reveals differences in functional and compositional recovery across ecosystems.

Most ecosystems are affected by anthropogenic or natural pulse disturbances, which alter the community composition and functioning for a limited period of time. Whether and how quickly communities recover from such pulses is central to our understanding of biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem organisation, but also to nature conservation and management. Here, we present a meta-analysis of 508 (semi-)natural field experiments globally distributed across marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.