The umbrella value of caribou management strategies for biodiversity conservation in boreal forests under global change.

Single-species conservation management is often proposed to preserve biodiversity in human-disturbed landscapes. How global change will impact the umbrella value of single-species management strategies remains an open question of critical conservation importance. We assessed the effectiveness of threatened boreal caribou as an umbrella for bird and beetle conservation under global change.

Insect-mediated apparent competition between mammals in a boreal food web.

While the important role of animal-mediated interactions in the top-down restructuring of plant communities is well documented, less is known of their ensuing repercussions at higher trophic levels. We demonstrate how typically decoupled ecological interactions may become intertwined such that the impact of an insect pest on forest structure and composition alters predator-prey interactions among large mammals. Specifically, we show how irruptions in a common, cyclic insect pest of the boreal forest, the spruce budworm (), modulated an indirect trophic interaction by initiating a flush in deciduous vegetation that benefited moose (), in turn strengthening apparent competition between moose and threatened boreal caribou () via wolf () predation.