Effects of deforestation on multitaxa community similarity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Habitat loss can lead to biotic homogenization (decrease in β diversity) or differentiation (increase in β diversity) of biological communities. However, it is unclear which of these ecological processes predominates in human-modified landscapes. We used data on vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants to quantify β diversity based on species occurrence and abundance among communities in 1367 landscapes with varying amounts of habitat (<30%, 30-60%, or >60% of forest cover) throughout the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Community assembly and metaphylogeography of soil biodiversity: Insights from haplotype-level community DNA metabarcoding within an oceanic island.

Most of our understanding of island diversity comes from the study of aboveground systems, while the patterns and processes of diversification and community assembly for belowground biotas remain poorly understood. Here, we take advantage of a relatively young and dynamic oceanic island to advance our understanding of ecoevolutionary processes driving community assembly within soil mesofauna. Using whole organism community DNA (wocDNA) metabarcoding and the recently developed metaMATE pipeline, we have generated spatially explicit and reliable haplotype-level DNA sequence data for soil mesofaunal assemblages sampled across the four main habitats within the island of Tenerife.

Toward accurate species-level metabarcoding of arthropod communities from the tropical forest canopy.

Metabarcoding of arthropod communities can be used for assessing species diversity in tropical forests but the methodology requires validation for accurate and repeatable species occurrences in complex mixtures. This study investigates how the composition of ecological samples affects the accuracy of species recovery.Starting with field-collected bulk samples from the tropical canopy, the recovery of specimens was tested for subsets of different body sizes and major taxa, by assembling these subsets into increasingly complex composite pools.

Interactive effects of temperature and habitat complexity on freshwater communities.

Warming can lead to increased growth of plants or algae at the base of the food web, which may increase the overall complexity of habitat available for other organisms. Temperature and habitat complexity have both been shown to alter the structure and functioning of communities, but they may also have interactive effects, for example, if the shade provided by additional habitat negates the positive effect of temperature on understory plant or algal growth. This study explored the interactive effects of these two major environmental factors in a manipulative field experiment, by assessing changes in ecosystem functioning (primary production and decomposition) and community structure in the presence and absence of artificial plants along a natural stream temperature gradient of 5-18°C.

Endoskeletal structure in (Osteichthyes, Actinopterygii), An early ray-finned fish.

As the sister lineage of all other actinopterygians, the Middle to Late Devonian (Eifelian-Frasnian) occupies a pivotal position in vertebrate phylogeny. Although the dermal skeleton of this taxon has been exhaustively described, very little of its endoskeleton is known, leaving questions of neurocranial and fin evolution in early ray-finned fishes unresolved. The model for early actinopterygian anatomy has instead been based largely on the Late Devonian (Frasnian) , preserved in stunning detail from the Gogo Formation of Australia.

Specialists in ancient trees are more affected by climate than generalists.

Ancient trees are considered one of the most important habitats for biodiversity in Europe and North America. They support exceptional numbers of specialized species, including a range of rare and endangered wood-living insects. In this study, we use a dataset of 105 sites spanning a climatic gradient along the oak range of Norway and Sweden to investigate the importance of temperature and precipitation on beetle species richness in ancient, hollow oak trees.

Limiting opportunities for cheating stabilizes virulence in insect parasitic nematodes.

Cooperative secretion of virulence factors by pathogens can lead to social conflict when cheating mutants exploit collective secretion, but do not contribute to it. If cheats outcompete cooperators within hosts, this can cause loss of virulence. Insect parasitic nematodes are important biocontrol tools that secrete a range of significant virulence factors.

Maintenance of Species Boundaries Despite Ongoing Gene Flow in Ragworts.

The role of hybridization between diversifying species has been the focus of a huge amount of recent evolutionary research. While gene flow can prevent speciation or initiate species collapse, it can also generate new hybrid species. Similarly, while adaptive divergence can be wiped out by gene flow, new adaptive variation can be introduced via introgression.

Metabarcoding of fungal communities associated with bark beetles.

Many species of fungi are closely allied with bark beetles, including many tree pathogens, but their species richness and patterns of distribution remain largely unknown. We established a protocol for metabarcoding of fungal communities directly from total genomic DNA extracted from individual beetles, showing that the ITS3/4 primer pair selectively amplifies the fungal ITS. Using three specimens of bark beetle from different species, we assess the fungal diversity associated with these specimens and the repeatability of these estimates in PCRs conducted with different primer tags.

Family-Level Sampling of Mitochondrial Genomes in Coleoptera: Compositional Heterogeneity and Phylogenetics.

Mitochondrial genomes are readily sequenced with recent technology and thus evolutionary lineages can be densely sampled. This permits better phylogenetic estimates and assessment of potential biases resulting from heterogeneity in nucleotide composition and rate of change. We gathered 245 mitochondrial sequences for the Coleoptera representing all 4 suborders, 15 superfamilies of Polyphaga, and altogether 97 families, including 159 newly sequenced full or partial mitogenomes.

Plant-soil feedbacks from 30-year family-specific soil cultures: phylogeny, soil chemistry and plant life stage.

Intraspecific negative feedback effects, where performance is reduced on soils conditioned by conspecifics, are widely documented in plant communities. However, interspecific feedbacks are less well studied, and their direction, strength, causes, and consequences are poorly understood. If more closely related species share pathogens, or have similar soil resource requirements, plants may perform better on soils conditioned by more distant phylogenetic relatives.

Metabolic variation in natural populations of wild yeast.

Ecological diversification depends on the extent of genetic variation and on the pattern of covariation with respect to ecological opportunities. We investigated the pattern of utilization of carbon substrates in wild populations of budding yeast Saccharomyces paradoxus. All isolates grew well on a core diet of about 10 substrates, and most were also able to grow on a much larger ancillary diet comprising most of the 190 substrates we tested.

Riparian reserves within oil palm plantations conserve logged forest leaf litter ant communities and maintain associated scavenging rates.

The expansion of oil palm plantations at the expense of tropical forests is causing declines in many species and altering ecosystem functions. Maintaining forest-dependent species and processes in these landscapes may therefore limit the negative impacts of this economically important industry. Protecting riparian vegetation may be one such opportunity; forest buffer strips are commonly protected for hydrological reasons, but can also conserve functionally important taxa and the processes they support.

Matching species traits to projected threats and opportunities from climate change.

Aim: Climate change can lead to decreased climatic suitability within species' distributions, increased fragmentation of climatically suitable space, and/or emergence of newly suitable areas outside present distributions. Each of these extrinsic threats and opportunities potentially interacts with specific intrinsic traits of species, yet this specificity is seldom considered in risk assessments. We present an analytical framework for examining projections of climate change-induced threats and opportunities with reference to traits that are likely to mediate species' responses, and illustrate the applicability of the framework.

Assessing the utility of statistical adjustments for imperfect detection in tropical conservation science.

In recent years, there has been a fast development of models that adjust for imperfect detection. These models have revolutionized the analysis of field data, and their use has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of sampling design and data quality. There are, however, several practical limitations associated with the use of detectability models which restrict their relevance to tropical conservation science.

BIOFRAG - a new database for analyzing BIOdiversity responses to forest FRAGmentation.

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses to fragmentation in a consistent and flexible database permits simple data retrieval for subsequent analyses.

Phages can constrain protist predation-driven attenuation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa virulence in multienemy communities.

The coincidental theory of virulence predicts that bacterial pathogenicity could be a by-product of selection by natural enemies in environmental reservoirs. However, current results are ambiguous and the simultaneous impact of multiple ubiquitous enemies, protists and phages on virulence evolution has not been investigated previously. Here we tested experimentally how Tetrahymena thermophila protist predation and PNM phage parasitism (bacteria-specific virus) alone and together affect the evolution of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 virulence, measured in wax moth larvae.

Cryptic speciation and chromosomal repatterning in the South African climbing mice Dendromus (Rodentia, Nesomyidae).

We evaluate the intra- and interspecific diversity in the four South African rodent species of the genus Dendromus. The molecular phylogenetic analysis on twenty-three individuals have been conducted on a combined dataset of nuclear and mitochondrial markers. Moreover, the extent and processes underlying chromosomal variation, have been investigated on three species by mean of G-, C-bands, NORs and Zoo-FISH analysis.

Phylogenetic plant community structure along elevation is lineage specific.

The trend of closely related taxa to retain similar environmental preferences mediated by inherited traits suggests that several patterns observed at the community scale originate from longer evolutionary processes. While the effects of phylogenetic relatedness have been previously studied within a single genus or family, lineage-specific effects on the ecological processes governing community assembly have rarely been studied for entire communities or flora. Here, we measured how community phylogenetic structure varies across a wide elevation gradient for plant lineages represented by 35 families, using a co-occurrence index and net relatedness index (NRI).

Correlates of hyperdiversity in southern African ice plants (Aizoaceae).

The exceptionally high plant diversity of the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) comprises a combination of ancient lineages and young radiations. A previous phylogenetic study of Aizoaceae subfamily Ruschioideae dated the radiation of this clade of > 1500 species in the GCFR to 3.8-8.

Patterns and dynamics of rapid local adaptation and sex in varying habitat types in rotifers.

Local adaptation is an important principle in a world of environmental change and might be critical for species persistence. We tested the hypothesis that replicated populations can attain rapid local adaptation under two varying laboratory environments. Clonal subpopulations of the cyclically parthenogenetic rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus were allowed to adapt to two varying harsh and a benign environment: a high-salt, a food-limited environment and untreated culture medium (no salt addition, high food).

The microsporidian parasite Vavraia culicis as a potential late life-acting control agent of malaria.

Microsporidian parasites are being considered as alternatives to conventional insecticides for malaria control. They should reduce malaria transmission by shortening the lifespan of female mosquitoes and thus killing them before they transmit malaria. As the parasite replicates throughout the mosquito's life, it should have little detrimental effects on young mosquitoes, thus putting less selection pressure on the hosts to evolve resistance.

Adaptation, extinction and global change.

We discuss three interlinked issues: the natural pace of environmental change and adaptation, the likelihood that a population will adapt to a potentially lethal change, and adaptation to elevated CO2, the prime mover of global change. Environmental variability is governed by power laws showing that ln difference in conditions increases with ln elapsed time at a rate of 0.3-0.