Drought mildly reduces plant dominance in a temperate prairie ecosystem across years.

Shifts in dominance and species reordering can occur in response to global change. However, it is not clear how altered precipitation and disturbance regimes interact to affect species composition and dominance.We explored community-level diversity and compositional similarity responses, both across and within years, to a manipulated precipitation gradient and annual clipping in a mixed-grass prairie in Oklahoma, USA.

Canada lynx use of burned areas: Conservation implications of changing fire regimes.

A fundamental problem in ecology is forecasting how species will react to major disturbances. As the climate warms, large, frequent, and severe fires are restructuring forested landscapes at large spatial scales, with unknown impacts on imperilled predators. We use the United States federally Threatened Canada lynx as a case study to examine how predators navigate recent large burns, with particular focus on habitat features and the spatial configuration (e.

Changing climate mediates sapsucker (Aves: ) hybrid zone movement.

Hybrid zones, where two divergent taxa meet and interbreed, offer unique opportunities to investigate how climate contributes to reproductive isolation between closely related taxa and how these taxa may respond to climatic changes. Red-naped () and Red-breasted () sapsuckers (Aves: Picidae) hybridize along a narrow contact zone that stretches from northern California to British Columbia. The hybrid zone between these species has been studied extensively for more than 100 years and represents an excellent system for investigations of the evolution of reproductive isolation.