Publications by authors named "Samuel R P-J Ross"

The diversity in organismal responses to environmental changes (i.e., response diversity) plays a crucial role in shaping community and ecosystem stability.

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Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events across the globe. Understanding the capacity for ecological communities to withstand and recover from such events is critical. Typhoons are extreme weather events that are expected to broadly homogenize ecological dynamics through structural damage to vegetation and longer-term effects of salinization.

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Biodiversity-stability relationships have frequently been studied in ecology, with the recent integration of traits to explain community stability over time. Classical theory underlying the biodiversity-stability relationship posits that different species' responses to the environment should stabilise community-level properties (e.g.

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Article Synopsis
  • Climate change is causing more frequent extreme weather events, like heatwaves, which could worsen the ecological effects of species loss, specifically predators.
  • This study found that when predator species are absent, heatwaves can destabilize algal communities in stream ecosystems, leading to homogenization.
  • The research highlights that the presence of predators can buffer these negative effects, emphasizing the need to conserve predator species to help mitigate climate change impacts.
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Ensuring reliable supply of services from nature is key to the sustainable development and well-being of human societies. Varied and frequently complex relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services have, however, frustrated our capacity to quantify and predict the vulnerability of those services to species extinctions. Here, we use a qualitative Boolean modelling framework to identify universal drivers of the robustness of ecosystem service supply to species loss.

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The classical MacArthur-Wilson theory of island biogeography (TIB) emphasizes the role of island area and isolation in determining island biotas, but is neutral with respect to species differences that could affect community assembly and persistence. Recent extensions of island biogeography theory address how functional differences among species may lead to non-random community assembly processes and different diversity-area scaling patterns. First, the trophic TIB considers how diversity scaling varies across trophic position in a community, with species at higher trophic levels being most strongly influenced by island area.

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