Genomics Reveal Population Structure and Intergeneric Hybridization in an Endangered South American Bird: Implications for Management and Conservation.

Genomics is an invaluable tool for conservation, particularly for endangered species impacted by wildlife trafficking. This study uses genomic data to provide new insights to aid conservation and management of endangered species, using as a case study the Yellow cardinal (), a bird endemic to southern South America severely affected by illegal trade and the transformation of its natural habitat. We explore population structure within the Yellow cardinal, delimiting management units and describing connectivity among them.

A Tale of Two Lakes: Divergent Evolutionary Trajectories of Two Populations Experiencing Distinct Environments.

Most studies of local adaptation substitute the correlation between spatial distance and environmental heterogeneity for the temporal dynamics over which local adaptation evolves. The availability of detailed ecological and genomic information from lake sediments provides an opportunity to study local adaptation with unparalleled clarity from the temporal perspective. Inference can be further enhanced by including multiple lakes along ecological axes to further isolate the effects of ecological change in driving local adaptation.

Behavioural changes in the city: The common black garden ant defends aphids more aggressively in urban environments.

Urbanisation alters biodiversity patterns and threatens to disrupt mutualistic interactions. Aside from pollination, however, little is known about how mutualisms change in cities. Our study aimed to assess how urbanisation affects the protective mutualism between ants and aphids, investigating potential behavioural changes in mutualistic ants and their implications for aphids in urban environments.

Bacterioplankton taxa compete for iron along the early spring-summer transition in the Arctic Ocean.

Microbial assemblages under the sea ice of the Dease Strait, Canadian Arctic, were sequenced for metagenomes of a small size fraction (0.2-3 μm). The community from early March was typical for this season, with - and Gammaproteobacteria as the dominant taxa, followed by Thaumarchaeota and Bacteroidetes.

A link between evolution and society fostering the UN sustainable development goals.

Given the multitude of challenges Earth is facing, sustainability science is of key importance to our continued existence. Evolution is the fundamental biological process underlying the origin of all biodiversity. This phylogenetic diversity fosters the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change, and provides numerous resources to society, and options for the future.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) reveals potential for interoceanic fish invasions across the Panama Canal.

Interoceanic canals can facilitate biological invasions as they connect the world's oceans and remove dispersal barriers between bioregions. As a consequence, multiple opportunities for biotic exchange arise and the resulting establishment of migrant species often causes adverse ecological and economic impacts. The Panama Canal is a key region for biotic exchange as it connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in Central America.

Critical role of parasite-mediated energy pathway on community response to nutrient enrichment.

Parasites form an integral part of food webs, however, they are often ignored in classic food web theory or limited to the investigation of trophic transmission pathways. Specifically, direct consumption of parasites by nonhost predators is rarely considered, while it can contribute substantially to energy flow in food webs. In aquatic systems, chytrids constitute a major group of fungal parasites whose free-living infective stages (zoospores) form a highly nutritional food source to zooplankton.

Nonlinear effects of environmental drivers shape macroinvertebrate biodiversity in an agricultural pondscape.

Agriculture is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and significantly impacts freshwater biodiversity through many stressors acting locally and on the landscape scale. The individual effects of these numerous stressors are often difficult to disentangle and quantify, as they might have nonlinear impacts on biodiversity. Within agroecosystems, ponds are biodiversity hotspots providing habitat for many freshwater species and resting or feeding places for terrestrial organisms.

The Ecologist's Career Compass: A game to explore career paths.

One of the most challenging endeavors for students is choosing a career path that best fits their interests, wills and skills, and setting their professional goals accordingly. Such decisions are often made from within the culture of academia, in which mentors and peers are mainly familiar with the academic job market and lack the knowledge necessary to consult about other types of careers. We aimed to address this gap for ecology and related fields by creating an engaging and effective tool to help students and professionals to familiarize themselves with the diversity of potential career paths available to ecologists.

Can size distributions of European lake fish communities be predicted by trophic positions of their fish species?

An organism's body size plays an important role in ecological interactions such as predator-prey relationships. As predators are typically larger than their prey, this often leads to a strong positive relationship between body size and trophic position in aquatic ecosystems. The distribution of body sizes in a community can thus be an indicator of the strengths of predator-prey interactions.

Morphometry of two cryptic tree frog species at their hybrid zone reveals neither intermediate nor transgressive morphotypes.

Under incomplete reproductive isolation, secondary contact of diverged allopatric lineages may lead to the formation of hybrid zones that allow to study recombinants over several generations as excellent systems of genomic interactions resulting from the evolutionary forces acting on certain genes and phenotypes. Hybrid phenotypes may either exhibit intermediacy or, alternatively, transgressive traits, which exceed the extremes of their parents due to epistasis and segregation of complementary alleles. While transgressive morphotypes have been examined in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals, studies in amphibians are rare.

Geomorphology variables predict fish assemblages for forested and endorheic rivers of two continents.

Stream fishes are restricted to specific environments with appropriate habitats for feeding and reproduction. Interactions between streams and surrounding landscapes influence the availability and type of fish habitat, nutrient concentrations, suspended solids, and substrate composition. Valley width and gradient are geomorphological variables that influence the frequency and intensity that a stream interacts with the surrounding landscape.

Genome-wide analysis of European sea bass provides insights into the evolution and functions of single-exon genes.

Several studies have attempted to understand the origin and evolution of single-exon genes (SEGs) in eukaryotic organisms, including fishes, but few have examined the functional and evolutionary relationships between SEGs and multiple-exon gene (MEG) paralogs, in particular the conservation of promoter regions. Given that SEGs originate via the reverse transcription of mRNA from a "parental" MEGs, such comparisons may enable identifying evolutionarily-related SEG/MEG paralogs, which might fulfill equivalent physiological functions. Here, the relationship of SEG proportion with MEG count, gene density, intron count, and chromosome size was assessed for the genome of the European sea bass, .

Valley-scale hydrogeomorphology drives river fish assemblage variation in Mongolia.

River hydrogeomorphology is a major driver shaping biodiversity and community composition. Here, we examine how hydrogeomorphic heterogeneity expressed by Functional Process Zones (FPZs) in river networks is associated with fish assemblage variation. We examined this association in two distinct ecoregions in Mongolia expected to display different gradients of river network hydrogeomorphic heterogeneity.

A conceptual map of invasion biology: Integrating hypotheses into a consensus network.

Background And Aims: Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, invasion biology has matured into a productive research field addressing questions of fundamental and applied importance. Not only has the number of empirical studies increased through time, but also has the number of competing, overlapping and, in some cases, contradictory hypotheses about biological invasions. To make these contradictions and redundancies explicit, and to gain insight into the field's current theoretical structure, we developed and applied a Delphi approach to create a consensus network of 39 existing invasion hypotheses.

Land Use, Not Stream Order, Controls NO Concentration and Flux in the Upper Mara River Basin, Kenya.

Anthropogenic activities have led to increases in nitrous oxide (NO) emissions from river systems, but there are large uncertainties in estimates due to lack of data in tropical rivers and rapid increase in human activity. We assessed the effects of land use and river size on NO flux and concentration in 46 stream sites in the Mara River, Kenya, during the transition from the wet (short rains) to dry season, November 2017 to January 2018. Flux estimates were similar to other studies in tropical and temperate systems, but in contrast to other studies, land use was more related to NO concentration and flux than stream size.

An empirical assessment of a single family-wide hybrid capture locus set at multiple evolutionary timescales in Asteraceae.

Premise: Hybrid capture with high-throughput sequencing (Hyb-Seq) is a powerful tool for evolutionary studies. The applicability of an Asteraceae family-specific Hyb-Seq probe set and the outcomes of different phylogenetic analyses are investigated here.

Methods: Hyb-Seq data from 112 Asteraceae samples were organized into groups at different taxonomic levels (tribe, genus, and species).

Insights from modeling studies on how climate change affects invasive alien species geography.

Climate change and biological invasions are threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide. It has now been widely acknowledged that climate change will affect biological invasions. A large number of studies have investigated predicted shifts and other changes in the geographic ranges of invasive alien species related to climate change using modeling approaches.

Projected effects of Climate-change-induced flow alterations on stream macroinvertebrate abundances.

Global change has the potential to affect river flow conditions which are fundamental determinants of physical habitats. Predictions of the effects of flow alterations on aquatic biota have mostly been assessed based on species ecological traits (e.g.

Benthic-pelagic coupling drives non-seasonal zooplankton blooms and restructures energy flows in shallow tropical lakes.

Zooplankton blooms are a frequent phenomenon in tropical systems. However, drivers of bloom formation and the contribution of emerging resting eggs are largely unexplored. We investigated the dynamics and the triggers of rotifer blooms in African soda-lakes and assessed their impact on other trophic levels.