Relational place-based solutions for environmental policy misalignments.

Current reductionist approaches to environmental governance cannot resolve social-ecological crises. Siloed institutions fail to address linked social and ecological processes, thereby neglecting issues of equity, justice, and cumulative effects. Global insights can be gained from Indigenous-led initiatives that support the resilience of relationships within and among places.

Boundary Spanning Methodological Approaches for Collaborative Moose Governance in Eeyou Istchee.

Natural resource governance challenges are often highly complex, particularly in Indigenous contexts. These challenges involve numerous landscape-level interactions, spanning jurisdictional, disciplinary, social, and ecological boundaries. In Eeyou Istchee, the James Bay Cree Territory of northern Quebec, Canada, traditional livelihoods depend on wild food species like moose.

Limited recovery following a massive seagrass decline in subarctic eastern Canada.

Over the last few decades, there has been an increasing recognition for seagrasses' contribution to the functioning of nearshore ecosystems and climate change mitigation. Nevertheless, seagrass ecosystems have been deteriorating globally at an accelerating rate during recent decades. In 2017, research into the condition of eelgrass (Zostera marina) along the eastern coast of James Bay, Canada, was initiated in response to reports of eelgrass decline by the Cree First Nations of Eeyou Istchee.

Coat color mismatch improves survival of a keystone boreal herbivore: Energetic advantages exceed lost camouflage.

Climate warming is causing asynchronies between animal phenology and environments. Mismatched traits, such as coat color change mismatched with snow, can decrease survival. However, coat change does not serve a singular adaptive benefit of camouflage, and alternate coat change functions may confer advantages that supersede mismatch costs.

City-scale energetics: window on adaptive thermal insulation in North American cities.

Previous research demonstrated that cities are similar to individual mammals in their relationship between the rate of energy use for heating and outdoor air temperature (T). At Ts requiring heating of indoor living spaces, the energy-T plot of a city contains information on city-wide thermal insulation (I), making it possible to quantify city-wide I by use of the city as the unit of measure. We develop methods for extracting this insulation information, deriving the methods from prior research on mammals.

Food availability and long-term predation risk interactively affect antipredator response.

Food availability and temporal variation in predation risk are both important determinants of the magnitude of antipredator responses, but their effects have rarely been examined simultaneously, particularly in wild prey. Here, we determine how food availability and long-term predation risk affect antipredator responses to acute predation risk by monitoring the foraging response of free-ranging snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) to an encounter with a Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) in Yukon, Canada, over four winters (2015-2016 to 2018-2019). We examined how this response was influenced by natural variation in long-term predation risk (2-month mortality rate of hares) while providing some individuals with supplemental food.

Decoupling the effects of food and density on life-history plasticity of wild animals using field experiments: Insights from the steward who sits in the shadow of its tail, the North American red squirrel.

Long-term studies of wild animals provide the opportunity to investigate how phenotypic plasticity is used to cope with environmental fluctuations and how the relationships between phenotypes and fitness can be dependent upon the ecological context. Many previous studies have only investigated life-history plasticity in response to changes in temperature, yet wild animals often experience multiple environmental fluctuations simultaneously. This requires field experiments to decouple which ecological factor induces plasticity in fitness-relevant traits to better understand their population-level responses to those environmental fluctuations.

Torpor expression is associated with differential spermatogenesis in hibernating eastern chipmunks.

Hibernators suppress physiological processes when expressing torpor, yet little is known about the effects of torpor on male reproductive physiology. Studies of hibernating mammals suggest that deep torpor negatively impacts spermatogenesis and that transitions between torpor and euthermic arousals increase cellular oxidative stress, with potentially damaging effects on sperm. Here, we hypothesize that variation in torpor expression affects the reproductive readiness of hibernators by impacting their sperm production.

Abiotic conditions mediate intraguild interactions between mammalian carnivores.

Intraguild (IG) interactions are common among mammalian carnivores, can include intraguild predation (IGP) and interspecific killing (IK), and are often asymmetrical, where a larger more dominant species (IG ) kills a smaller one (IG ). According to ecological theory, the potential for an IG and IG to coexist depends on whether the direct consumptive benefits for the IG are substantial (IGP) or insignificant (IK), the extent to which the IG is the superior exploitative competitor on shared prey resources, and overall ecosystem productivity. We used resource selection models and spatially explicit age and harvest data for two closely related mesopredators that engage in IG interactions, American martens (Martes americana; IG ) and fishers (Pekania pennanti; IG ), to identify drivers of distributions, delineate areas of sympatry and allopatry, and explore the role of an apex predator (coyote; Canis latrans) on these interactions.

Behavioral classification of low-frequency acceleration and temperature data from a free-ranging small mammal.

The miniaturization and affordability of new technology is driving a biologging revolution in wildlife ecology with use of animal-borne data logging devices. Among many new biologging technologies, accelerometers are emerging as key tools for continuously recording animal behavior. Yet a critical, but under-acknowledged consideration in biologging is the trade-off between sampling rate and sampling duration, created by battery- (or memory-) related sampling constraints.

Phenological shifts in North American red squirrels: disentangling the roles of phenotypic plasticity and microevolution.

Phenological shifts are the most widely reported ecological responses to climate change, but the requirements to distinguish their causes (i.e. phenotypic plasticity vs.

Seasonal, spatial, and maternal effects on gut microbiome in wild red squirrels.

Background: Our understanding of gut microbiota has been limited primarily to findings from human and laboratory animals, but what shapes the gut microbiota in nature remains largely unknown. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive study of gut microbiota of a well-studied North American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) population. Red squirrels are territorial, solitary, and live in a highly seasonal environment and therefore represent a very attractive system to study factors that drive the temporal and spatial dynamics of gut microbiota.

Understanding Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality: An Introduction to the Symposium.

Seasonality is a critically important aspect of environmental variability, and strongly shapes all aspects of life for organisms living in highly seasonal environments. Seasonality has played a key role in generating biodiversity, and has driven the evolution of extreme physiological adaptations and behaviors such as migration and hibernation. Fluctuating selection pressures on survival and fecundity between summer and winter provide a complex selective landscape, which can be met by a combination of three outcomes of adaptive evolution: genetic polymorphism, phenotypic plasticity, and bet-hedging.

To Everything There Is a Season: Summer-to-Winter Food Webs and the Functional Traits of Keystone Species.

From a trophic perspective, a seasonal increase in air temperature and photoperiod propagates as bottom-up pulse of primary production by plants, secondary production by herbivores, and tertiary production by carnivores. However, food web seasonality reflects not only abiotic variation in temperature and photoperiod, but also the composition of the biotic community and their functional responses to this variation. Some plants and animals-here referred to as seasonal specialists-decouple from food webs in winter through migration or various forms of metabolic arrest (e.

Fitness consequences of peak reproductive effort in a resource pulse system.

The age trajectory of reproductive performance of many iteroparous species features an early - life increase in performance followed by a late - life senescent decline. The largest contribution of lifetime reproductive success is therefore gained at the age at which reproductive performance peaks. Using long term data on North American red squirrels we show that the environmental conditions individuals encountered could cause variation among individuals in the "height" and timing of this peak, contributing to life history variation and fitness in this population that experiences irregular resource pulses.

Multilevel and sex-specific selection on competitive traits in North American red squirrels.

Individuals often interact more closely with some members of the population (e.g., offspring, siblings, or group members) than they do with other individuals.

Embracing heterothermic diversity: non-stationary waveform analysis of temperature variation in endotherms.

Recent research is revealing incredible diversity in the thermoregulatory patterns of wild and captive endotherms. As a result of these findings, classic thermoregulatory categories of 'homeothermy', 'daily heterothermy', and 'hibernation' are becoming harder to delineate, impeding our understanding of the physiological and evolutionary significance of variation within and around these categories. However, we lack a generalized analytical approach for evaluating and comparing the complex and diversified nature of the full breadth of heterothermy expressed by individuals, populations, and species.

The role of digital data entry in participatory environmental monitoring.

Many argue that monitoring conducted exclusively by scientists is insufficient to address ongoing environmental challenges. One solution entails the use of mobile digital devices in participatory monitoring (PM) programs. But how digital data entry affects programs with varying levels of stakeholder participation, from nonscientists collecting field data to nonscientists administering every step of a monitoring program, remains unclear.

Food Web Structure in Temporally-Forced Ecosystems.

Temporal variation characterizes many of Earth's ecosystems. Despite this, little is known about how food webs respond to regular variation in time, such as occurs broadly with season. We argue that season, and likely any periodicity, structures food webs along a temporal axis in an analogous way to that previously recognized in space; predators shift their diet as different resource compartments and trophic levels become available through time.

The nature of nurture in a wild mammal's fitness.

Genetic variation in fitness is required for the adaptive evolution of any trait but natural selection is thought to erode genetic variance in fitness. This paradox has motivated the search for mechanisms that might maintain a population's adaptive potential. Mothers make many contributions to the attributes of their developing offspring and these maternal effects can influence responses to natural selection if maternal effects are themselves heritable.

Predators, energetics and fitness drive neonatal reproductive failure in red squirrels.

Neonatal reproductive failure should occur when energetic costs of parental investment outweigh fitness benefits. However, little is known about the drivers of neonatal reproductive failure in free-ranging species experiencing continuous natural variation in predator abundance and in the energetic and fitness costs and benefits associated with parental investment. Long-term comprehensive studies are required to better understand how biotic, abiotic and life-history conditions interact to drive occurrences of reproductive failure in the wild.