Publications by authors named "Jean-Philippe Lessard"

Article Synopsis
  • Urbanization poses a significant threat to biodiversity, particularly affecting wild bee populations, which are declining globally.
  • The study explores how floral traits, specifically nectar sugar concentration and corolla length, influence bee species richness in urban green spaces in Montreal, supporting the idea that diverse flower shapes can help sustain bee communities.
  • The results indicate that enhancing the variety of floral morphologies can positively impact wild bee diversity, suggesting effective management practices for urban ecosystems.
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Climate change is driving the global redistribution of species. A common assumption is that rapid range shifts occur in tandem with overall stable or positive abundance trends throughout the range and thus these species may be considered as climate change 'winners'. However, although establishing the link between range shift velocities and population trends is crucial for predicting climate change impacts it has not been empirically tested.

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Dispersal has a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parameterised heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. However, this heterogeneity is recurrently neglected when studying the processes underlying biodiversity variation.

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Phenotypic plasticity enables rapid responses to environmental change, and could facilitate range shifts in response to climate change. What drives the evolution of plasticity at range edges, and the capacity of range-edge individuals to be plastic, remain unclear. Here, we propose that accurately predicting when plasticity itself evolves or mediates adaptive evolution at expanding range edges requires integrating knowledge on the demography and evolution of edge populations.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Ants, like plants, engage in foraging behavior and can be analyzed using similar functional traits frameworks, such as the 'leaf economics spectrum.'
  • * The study outlines parallels and differences in ecological strategies between plants and ants, emphasizing future research directions to improve our understanding of these strategies in eusocial organisms.
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Global biodiversity is organised into biogeographic regions that comprise distinct biotas. The contemporary factors maintaining differences in species composition between regions are poorly understood. Given evidence that populations with sufficient genetic variation can adapt to fill new habitats, it is surprising that more homogenisation of species assemblages across regions has not occurred.

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Article Synopsis
  • Changes in evolution can affect how insect pests, pollinators, or disease-carrying insects move to new places.
  • It's important to pay attention to these changes because they can have big effects on the environment and the economy, but they often get ignored in managing these issues.
  • To better understand and deal with these changes, scientists need to use smart study designs and new technology, and future plans should take into account how insects adapt to new situations for the benefit of nature and its services.
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  • Biologists are exploring whether certain geographical areas have more pronounced phenotypic complexity, especially in superorganisms like ant colonies with distinct queen and worker castes.
  • Utilizing data from nearly 9000 ant species, the study finds that arid regions, such as tropical savannahs and deserts, are hotspots for worker polymorphism despite being species-poor.
  • The research suggests that worker polymorphism may offer adaptive benefits in harsh environments, providing insights into conditions that foster complex biological traits.
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The morphology of organisms relates to most aspects of their life history and autecology. As such, elucidating the drivers of morphological variation along environmental gradients might give insight into processes limiting species distributions. In eusocial organisms, the concept of morphology is more complex than in solitary organisms.

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Background: The Odonata, dragonflies and damselflies, constitute one of the more charismatic and better-studied orders of insects. The approximately 6,000 extant species on Earth can be variously found on all continents, except Antarctica. A relatively stable taxonomy, a relative ease of species identification and an aquatic immature stage has made the Odonata a taxon of interest in documenting the symptoms of global environmental change, especially at higher latitudes.

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Background: Biological invasions are major drivers of environmental change that can significantly alter ecosystem function and diversity. In plants, soil microbes play an important role in plant establishment and growth; however, relatively little is known about the role they might play in biological invasions. A first step to assess whether root microbes may be playing a role in the invasion process is to find out if invasive plants host different microbes than neighbouring native plant species.

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What forces structure ecological assemblages? A key limitation to general insights about assemblage structure is the availability of data that are collected at a small spatial grain (local assemblages) and a large spatial extent (global coverage). Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51 ,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of more than 2,693 species and 7,953 morphospecies from local assemblages collected at 4,212 locations around the world. Ants were selected because they are diverse and abundant globally, comprise a large fraction of animal biomass in most terrestrial communities, and are key contributors to a range of ecosystem functions.

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  • Ecologists aim to understand how various processes work together to shape species groups, facing complex challenges.
  • The study uses a method that defines species pools to evaluate the impacts of environmental filtering, dispersal limitations, and biotic interactions on hummingbird assemblages, revealing that temperature is the primary regional filter.
  • By incorporating environmental filters, the research unveils hidden patterns of phylogenetic evenness, suggesting that biotic interactions also play a role, highlighting the need for revisiting previous studies that overlooked these important processes.
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We present a framework to measure the strength of environmental filtering and disequilibrium of the species composition of a local community across time, relative to past, current, and future climates. We demonstrate the framework by measuring the impact of climate change on New World forests, integrating data for climate niches of more than 14000 species, community composition of 471 New World forest plots, and observed climate across the most recent glacial-interglacial interval. We show that a majority of communities have species compositions that are strongly filtered and are more in equilibrium with current climate than random samples from the regional pool.

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  • Research highlights how climate change and habitat disturbance together affect ant biodiversity, showing complex interactions between temperature, precipitation, and disturbance levels.
  • Species richness increases with temperature but decreases with habitat disturbance, while evenness shows varying responses based on environmental conditions.
  • In warmer, drier climates, the negative impact of disturbance on biodiversity can equate to experiencing a significant drop in temperature, indicating greater risks in these environments.
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  • Understanding how species richness and lineage composition vary geographically is a key goal in ecology, focusing on why certain lineages thrive while others don't and how newcomers integrate into existing fauna.
  • We analyzed passerine bird assemblies across four biogeographic regions, using morphological traits related to habitat and foraging to explore how colonization history and niche processes shape these communities.
  • Our findings suggest that the assembly of these bird communities is complex and inconsistent, with both support and challenges to the idea that first colonizers limit the success of later ones, highlighting the unique evolutionary paths of different bird groups.
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An ever-increasing number of studies use tools from community phylogenetics to infer the processes underlying the assembly of communities. However, very few studies simultaneously use experimental approaches to characterize the ecological niches of species and directly assess the importance of these structuring processes. In this study, we developed an experimental approach for quantifying the use of four types of food resources and three habitat templets in temperate forest ant assemblages.

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Kreft and Jetz's critique of our recent update of Wallace's zoogeographical regions disregards the extensive sensitivity analyses we undertook, which demonstrate the robustness of our results to the choice of phylogenetic data and clustering algorithm. Their suggested distinction between "transition zones" and biogeographic regions is worthy of further investigation but is thus far unsubstantiated.

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The opportunity to reflect broadly on the accomplishments, prospects, and reach of a field may present itself relatively infrequently. Each biennial meeting of the International Biogeography Society showcases ideas solicited and developed largely during the preceding year, by individuals or teams from across the breadth of the discipline. Here, we highlight challenges, developments, and opportunities in biogeography from that biennial synthesis.

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Modern attempts to produce biogeographic maps focus on the distribution of species, and the maps are typically drawn without phylogenetic considerations. Here, we generate a global map of zoogeographic regions by combining data on the distributions and phylogenetic relationships of 21,037 species of amphibians, birds, and mammals. We identify 20 distinct zoogeographic regions, which are grouped into 11 larger realms.

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Resolving contingencies in community ecology requires comparative studies of local communities along broad-scale environmental gradients and in different biogeographic regions. However, comparisons of local ecological processes among regions require a synthetic understanding of how the species pool of potential community members influences the structure of ecological communities. Here, we outline an integrative approach for quantifying local ecological processes while explicitly accounting for species pool influences.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how regional species pools and local interactions shape the structure of local ant communities across different climates.
  • The researchers analyze a continent-wide dataset and emphasize the importance of accurately defining source pools to understand community patterns.
  • Findings reveal that as you move from tropical to temperate regions, the phylogenetic relatedness of ant species decreases, highlighting how climate influences both evolution and community structure.
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Tropical forest canopies house most of the globe's diversity, yet little is known about global patterns and drivers of canopy diversity. Here, we present models of ant species density, using climate, abundance and habitat (i.e.

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  • The study highlights the crucial role of genetic variation in dominant plant species, specifically Solidago altissima, in supporting biodiversity and pollinator visitation.
  • Findings reveal that plant genotypes significantly affect flower visitor abundance, with genotypic diversity leading to higher floral production and increased pollinator visits.
  • The research suggests that decreasing genetic diversity in plants could contribute to pollinator declines, impacting both agricultural and natural ecosystems.
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