The role of seasonality in shaping the interactions of honeybees with other taxa.

The Eltonian niche of a species is defined as its set of interactions with other taxa. How this set varies with biotic, abiotic and human influences is a core question of modern ecology. In seasonal environments, the realized Eltonian niche is likely to vary due to periodic changes in the occurrence and abundance of interaction partners and changes in species behavior and preferences.

The impact of xylan on the biosynthesis and structure of extracellular lignin produced by a Norway spruce tissue culture.

In order to develop more economic uses of lignin, greater knowledge regarding its native structure is required. This can inform the development of optimized extraction methods that preserve desired structural properties. Current extraction methods alter the polymeric structure of lignin, leading to a loss of valuable structural groups or the formation of new non-native ones.

Novel frontier in wildlife monitoring: Identification of small rodent species from fecal pellets using near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS).

Small rodents are prevalent and functionally important across the world's biomes, making their monitoring salient for ecosystem management, conservation, forestry, and agriculture. There is a growing need for cost-effective and noninvasive methods for large-scale, intensive sampling. Fecal pellet counts readily provide relative abundance indices, and given suitable analytical methods, feces could also allow for the determination of multiple ecological and physiological variables, including community composition.

Different temporal trends in vascular plant and bryophyte communities along elevational gradients over four decades.

Despite many studies showing biodiversity responses to warming, the generality of such responses across taxonomic groups remains unclear. Very few studies have tested for evidence of bryophyte community responses to warming, even though bryophytes are major contributors to diversity and functioning in many ecosystems. Here, we report an empirical study comparing long-term change in bryophyte and vascular plant communities in two sites with contrasting long-term warming trends, using "legacy" botanical records as a baseline for comparison with contemporary resurveys.

Distance decay 2.0 - A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities.

Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology.

Body size and tree species composition determine variation in prey consumption in a forest-inhabiting generalist predator.

Trophic interactions may strongly depend on body size and environmental variation, but this prediction has been seldom tested in nature. Many spiders are generalist predators that use webs to intercept flying prey. The size and mesh of orb webs increases with spider size, allowing a more efficient predation on larger prey.

Higher host plant specialization of root-associated endophytes than mycorrhizal fungi along an arctic elevational gradient.

How community-level specialization differs among groups of organisms, and changes along environmental gradients, is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms influencing ecological communities. In this paper, we investigate the specialization of root-associated fungi for plant species, asking whether the level of specialization varies with elevation. For this, we applied DNA barcoding based on the ITS region to root samples of five plant species equivalently sampled along an elevational gradient at a high arctic site.

Joint species distribution modelling with the r-package Hmsc.

Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) is becoming an increasingly popular statistical method for analysing data in community ecology. Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) is a general and flexible framework for fitting JSDMs. HMSC allows the integration of community ecology data with data on environmental covariates, species traits, phylogenetic relationships and the spatio-temporal context of the study, providing predictive insights into community assembly processes from non-manipulative observational data of species communities.

Comparing RADseq and microsatellites for estimating genetic diversity and relatedness - Implications for brown trout conservation.

The conservation and management of endangered species requires information on their genetic diversity, relatedness and population structure. The main genetic markers applied for these questions are microsatellites and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the latter of which remain the more resource demanding approach in most cases. Here, we compare the performance of two approaches, SNPs obtained by restriction-site-associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) and 16 DNA microsatellite loci, for estimating genetic diversity, relatedness and genetic differentiation of three, small, geographically close wild brown trout () populations and a regionally used hatchery strain.

The Klingon batbugs: Morphological adaptations in the primitive bat bugs, and , including updated phylogeny of Cimicidae.

The Cimicidae is a family of blood-dependent ectoparasites in which dispersion capacity is greatly associated with host movements. Bats are the ancestral and most prevalent hosts for cimicids. Cimicids have a worldwide distribution matching that of their hosts, but the global classification is incomplete, especially for species outside the most common Cimicidae taxa.

Table for five, please: Dietary partitioning in boreal bats.

Differences in diet can explain resource partitioning in apparently similar, sympatric species. Here, we analyzed 1,252 fecal droppings from five species (, and ) to reveal their dietary niches using fecal DNA metabarcoding. We identified nearly 550 prey species in 13 arthropod orders.

Habitat quality is more important than matrix quality for bird communities in protected areas.

Protected areas are meant to preserve native local communities within their boundaries, but they are not independent from their surroundings. Impoverished habitat quality in the matrix might influence the species composition within the protected areas through biotic homogenization. The aim of this study was to determine the impacts of matrix quality on species richness and trait composition of bird communities from the Finnish reserve area network and whether the communities are being subject of biotic homogenization due to the lowered quality of the landscape matrix.

Pellets of proof: First glimpse of the dietary composition of adult odonates as revealed by metabarcoding of feces.

Recent advances in molecular techniques allow us to resolve the diet of unstudied taxa. Odonates are potentially important top-down regulators of many insects. Yet, to date, our knowledge of odonate prey use is based mainly on limited observations of odonates catching or eating their prey.

Spatial subsidies in spider diets vary with shoreline structure: Complementary evidence from molecular diet analysis and stable isotopes.

Inflow of matter and organisms may strongly affect the local density and diversity of organisms. This effect is particularly evident on shores where organisms with aquatic larval stages enter the terrestrial food web. The identities of such trophic links are not easily estimated as spiders, a dominant group of shoreline predator, have external digestion.