Extensive regional variation in the phenology of insects and their response to temperature across North America.

Climate change models often assume similar responses to temperatures across the range of a species, but local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity can lead plants and animals to respond differently to temperature in different parts of their range. To date, there have been few tests of this assumption at the scale of continents, so it is unclear if this is a large-scale problem. Here, we examined the assumption that insect taxa show similar responses to temperature at 96 sites in grassy habitats across North America.

Arthropods and Fire Within the Biologically Diverse Longleaf Pine Ecosystem.

The longleaf pine Miller (Pinales: Pinaceae) ecosystem once covered as many as 37 million hectares across the southeastern United States. Through fire suppression, development, and conversion to other plantation pines, this coverage has dwindled to fewer than 2 million hectares. A recent focus on the restoration of this ecosystem has revealed its complex and biologically diverse nature.

The importance of termites and fire to dead wood consumption in the longleaf pine ecosystem.

Microbes, insects, and fire are the primary drivers of wood loss from most ecosystems, but interactions among these factors remain poorly understood. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that termites and fire have a synergistic effect on wood loss from the fire-adapted longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) ecosystem in the southeastern United States.