Publications by authors named "Trevor Fristoe"

Article Synopsis
  • Darwin's naturalization conundrum involves two conflicting ideas about whether alien species related to native species are more likely to thrive in new areas.
  • A study of over 219,000 native and 9,500 naturalized plant species revealed that at higher latitudes, naturalized aliens are more closely related to native species, suggesting they adapt better to harsher climates.
  • Human activity has worsened this trend by favoring alien species that are less related to natives in warmer, drier regions, highlighting the importance of considering both climate and human impact when studying this topic.
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Plant introductions outside their native ranges by humans have led to substantial ecological consequences. While we have gained considerable knowledge about intercontinental introductions, the distribution and determinants of intracontinental aliens remain poorly understood. Here, we studied naturalized (i.

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Article Synopsis
  • Human activities are causing species to move and establish in new areas, with some regions providing more successful alien species than others.
  • The evolutionary imbalance hypothesis explains that differences in species fitness across biogeographic areas affect how well these species adapt when introduced to new environments.
  • Our findings show that successful alien species often come from biodiverse regions and share characteristics with cultivated plants, indicating that evolutionary factors influence species' movements and human selection.
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Article Synopsis
  • Darwin's naturalization hypothesis suggests that successful alien species are distantly related to native plants, while the pre-adaptation hypothesis predicts the opposite.
  • The study tested these hypotheses by examining the relationship between alien species introductions and their phylogenetic distance to native flora in Southern Africa.
  • Results showed that while distant relatives are more likely to be introduced, closely related species tend to naturalize better, and distant relatives can become invasive once naturalized, indicating different dynamics at each stage of invasion.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzes the impact of naturalized plant species on the uniqueness of regional floras across 658 global regions, revealing significant taxonomic and phylogenetic homogenization due to these alien plants.
  • It highlights that the natural decline in similarity among floras as geographic distance increases is lessened by the presence of naturalized species, with climate similarity further driving floristic homogenization.
  • The research suggests that historical relationships and current administrative ties between regions increase plant exchange, posing a threat to the uniqueness of regional floras, and warns that without better biosecurity, globalization will continue to diminish floristic diversity worldwide.
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Article Synopsis
  • Understanding what makes alien species successful can help predict future invasions.
  • Researchers identified three key dimensions of invasiveness: local abundance, geographic range size, and habitat breadth, analyzing data from over one million vegetation plots across Europe.
  • The study found that earlier introductions and certain traits, especially from acquisitive growth strategists, contributed to higher success rates in invasiveness, while also highlighting unique patterns in specific habitats.
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The evolution of agriculture improved food security and enabled significant increases in the size and complexity of human groups. Despite these positive effects, some societies never adopted these practices, became only partially reliant on them, or even reverted to foraging after temporarily adopting them. Given the critical importance of climate and biotic interactions for modern agriculture, it seems likely that ecological conditions could have played a major role in determining the degree to which different societies adopted farming.

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Humans cultivate thousands of economic plants (i.e. plants with economic value) outside their native ranges.

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The ecological contexts that promote larger brains have received considerable attention, but those that result in smaller-than-expected brains have been largely overlooked. Here, we use a global sample of 2062 species to provide evidence that metabolic and life history tradeoffs govern the evolution of brain size in birds and play an important role in defining the ecological strategies capable of persisting in Earth's most thermally variable and unpredictable habitats. While some birds cope with extreme winter conditions by investing in large brains (e.

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The cognitive buffer hypothesis posits that environmental variability can be a major driver of the evolution of cognition because an enhanced ability to produce flexible behavioural responses facilitates coping with the unexpected. Although comparative evidence supports different aspects of this hypothesis, a direct connection between cognition and the ability to survive a variable and unpredictable environment has yet to be demonstrated. Here, we use complementary demographic and evolutionary analyses to show that among birds, the mechanistic premise of this hypothesis is well supported but the implied direction of causality is not.

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Scientists are typically responsible for greater greenhouse gas emissions than the general population. These 'extra' emissions are largely due to frequent travel, often by airplane, to professional and academic meetings. In the following commentary, we explore how employing mixed modes of transportation, particularly by prioritizing train travel, can significantly reduce the environmental costs associated with attending conferences.

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The extent to which different kinds of organisms have adapted to environmental temperature regimes is central to understanding how they respond to climate change. The Scholander-Irving (S-I) model of heat transfer lays the foundation for explaining how endothermic birds and mammals maintain their high, relatively constant body temperatures in the face of wide variation in environmental temperature. The S-I model shows how body temperature is regulated by balancing the rates of heat production and heat loss.

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The current economic paradigm, which is based on increasing human population, economic development, and standard of living, is no longer compatible with the biophysical limits of the finite Earth. Failure to recover from the economic crash of 2008 is not due just to inadequate fiscal and monetary policies. The continuing global crisis is also due to scarcity of critical resources.

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Two interacting forces influence all populations: the Malthusian dynamic of exponential growth until resource limits are reached, and the Darwinian dynamic of innovation and adaptation to circumvent these limits through biological and/or cultural evolution. The specific manifestations of these forces in modern human society provide an important context for determining how humans can establish a sustainable relationship with the finite Earth.

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The discipline of sustainability science has emerged in response to concerns of natural and social scientists, policymakers, and lay people about whether the Earth can continue to support human population growth and economic prosperity. Yet, sustainability science has developed largely independently from and with little reference to key ecological principles that govern life on Earth. A macroecological perspective highlights three principles that should be integral to sustainability science: 1) physical conservation laws govern the flows of energy and materials between human systems and the environment, 2) smaller systems are connected by these flows to larger systems in which they are embedded, and 3) global constraints ultimately limit flows at smaller scales.

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