Scale-dependent effects of marine subsidies on the island biogeographic patterns of plants.

Although species richness can be determined by different mechanisms at different spatial scales, the role of scale in the effects of marine inputs on island biogeography has not been studied explicitly. Here, we evaluated the potential influence of island characteristics and marine inputs (seaweed wrack biomass and marine-derived nitrogen in the soil) on plant species richness at both a local (plot) and regional (island) scale on 92 islands in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the effects of subsidies on species richness depend strongly on spatial scale.

Marine subsidy promotes spatial and dietary niche variation in an omnivore, the Keen's mouse ().

Marine-derived resource subsidies can generate intrapopulation variation in the behaviors and diets of terrestrial consumers. How omnivores respond, given their multiple trophic interactions, is not well understood. We sampled mice () and their food sources at five sites on three islands of the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada, to test predictions regarding variation in the spatial behavior and consumption of marine-subsidized foods among individuals.

Using stable isotopes to infer stock-specific high-seas distribution of maturing sockeye salmon in the North Pacific.

The stock-specific distribution of maturing salmon in the North Pacific has been a persistent information gap that has prevented us from determining the ocean conditions experienced by individual stocks. This continues to impede understanding of the role of ocean conditions in stock-specific population dynamics. We assessed scale archives for 17 sockeye salmon () stocks covering the entire North Pacific, from the Columbia River (Washington State and British Columbia) to Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia), to infer salmon locations during their last growing season before returning to their spawning grounds.

Sex and occupation time influence niche space of a recovering keystone predator.

Predators exert strong effects on ecological communities, particularly when they re-occupy areas after decades of extirpation. Within species, such effects can vary over time and by sex and cascade across trophic levels. We used a space-for-time substitution to make foraging observations of sea otters () across a gradient of reoccupation time (1-30 years), and nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) analysis to ask whether (a) sea otter niche space varies as a function of occupation time and (b) whether niche space varies by sex.