Trait-based sensitivity of large mammals to a catastrophic tropical cyclone.

Extreme weather events perturb ecosystems and increasingly threaten biodiversity. Ecologists emphasize the need to forecast and mitigate the impacts of these events, which requires knowledge of how risk is distributed among species and environments. However, the scale and unpredictability of extreme events complicate risk assessment-especially for large animals (megafauna), which are ecologically important and disproportionately threatened but are wide-ranging and difficult to monitor.

Trophic rewilding revives biotic resistance to shrub invasion.

Trophic rewilding seeks to rehabilitate degraded ecosystems by repopulating them with large animals, thereby re-establishing strong top-down interactions. Yet there are very few tests of whether such initiatives can restore ecosystem structure and functions, and on what timescales. Here we show that war-induced collapse of large-mammal populations in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park exacerbated woody encroachment by the invasive shrub Mimosa pigra-considered one of the world's 100 worst invasive species-and that one decade of concerted trophic rewilding restored this invasion to pre-war baseline levels.

War-induced collapse and asymmetric recovery of large-mammal populations in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique.

How do large-mammal communities reassemble after being pushed to the brink of extinction? Few data are available to answer this question, as it is rarely possible to document both the decline and recovery of wildlife populations. Here we present the first in-depth quantitative account of war-induced collapse and postwar recovery in a diverse assemblage of large herbivores. In Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, we assembled data from 15 aerial wildlife counts conducted before (1968-1972) and after (1994-2018) the Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992).

Cascading impacts of large-carnivore extirpation in an African ecosystem.

Populations of the world's largest carnivores are declining and now occupy mere fractions of their historical ranges. Theory predicts that when apex predators disappear, large herbivores become less fearful, occupy new habitats, and modify those habitats by eating new food plants. Yet experimental support for this prediction has been difficult to obtain in large-mammal systems.