Publications by authors named "Elise Filotas"

Biological insurance theory predicts that, in a variable environment, aggregate ecosystem properties will vary less in more diverse communities because declines in the performance or abundance of some species or phenotypes will be offset, at least partly, by smoother declines or increases in others. During the past two decades, ecology has accumulated strong evidence for the stabilising effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning. As biological insurance is reaching the stage of a mature theory, it is critical to revisit and clarify its conceptual foundations to guide future developments, applications and measurements.

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Article Synopsis
  • Ecosystem functions of forests face threats from global changes like climate warming, land-use changes, and invasive species, necessitating new resilience-based management strategies.
  • A multidimensional approach focusing on species traits and forest connectivity is proposed to assess forest resilience in a rural landscape of southeastern Canada, comparing two management strategies: functional enrichment and multi-species plantations.
  • Results indicate both strategies improve resilience by enhancing functional diversity and connectivity, but prioritizing functional enrichment in less diverse patches is more effective, while randomly distributed plantations increase connectivity more than those in specific areas.
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A rich body of knowledge links biodiversity to ecosystem functioning (BEF), but it is primarily focused on small scales. We review the current theory and identify six expectations for scale dependence in the BEF relationship: (1) a nonlinear change in the slope of the BEF relationship with spatial scale; (2) a scale-dependent relationship between ecosystem stability and spatial extent; (3) coexistence within and among sites will result in a positive BEF relationship at larger scales; (4) temporal autocorrelation in environmental variability affects species turnover and thus the change in BEF slope with scale; (5) connectivity in metacommunities generates nonlinear BEF and stability relationships by affecting population  synchrony at local and regional scales; (6) spatial scaling in food web structure and diversity will generate scale dependence in ecosystem functioning. We suggest directions for synthesis that combine approaches in metaecosystem and metacommunity ecology and integrate cross-scale feedbacks.

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Identifying adaptive loci is important to understand the evolutionary potential of species undergoing range expansion. However, in expanding populations, spatial demographic processes such as allele surfing can create spatial patterns of neutral genetic variation that appear similar to those generated through adaptive processes. As a result, the false discovery rate of adaptive loci may be inflated in landscape genomic analyses.

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The development of efficient ecosystem resilience indicators was identified as one of the key research priorities in the improvement of existing sustainable forest management frameworks. Two indicators of tree diversity associated with ecosystem functioning have recently received particular attention in the literature: functional redundancy (FR) and response diversity (RD). We examined how these indicators could be used to predict post-logging productivity in forests of Québec, Canada.

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Functional zoning has been suggested as a way to balance the needs of a viable forest industry with those of healthy ecosystems. Under this system, part of the forest is set aside for protected areas, counterbalanced by intensive and extensive management of the rest of the forest. Studies indicate this may provide adequate timber while minimizing road construction and favoring the development of large mature and old stands.

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The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and the relative impact of positive interspecific interactions in shaping communities in a spatial context is not well understood. Here we employ a spatially explicit metacommunity model to investigate the effect of local dispersal on the structure and function of communities in which species are linked through an interaction web comprising mutualism, competition and exploitation.

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Transitions in ecological systems often occur without apparent warning, and may represent shifts between alternative persistent states. Decreasing ecological resilience (the size of the basin of attraction around a stable state) can signal an impending transition, but this effect is difficult to measure in practice. Recent research has suggested that a decreasing rate of recovery from small perturbations (critical slowing down) is a good indicator of ecological resilience.

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