A framework for managing infectious diseases in rural areas in low- and middle-income countries in the face of climate change-East Africa as a case study.

Climate change is having unprecedented impacts on human health, including increasing infectious disease risk. Despite this, health systems across the world are currently not prepared for novel disease scenarios anticipated with climate change. While the need for health systems to develop climate change adaptation strategies has been stressed in the past, there is no clear consensus on how this can be achieved, especially in rural areas in low- and middle-income countries that experience high disease burdens and climate change impacts simultaneously.

Social vocalizations indicate behavioural type in bats.

Vocalizations play a crucial role in the social systems of many animals and may inadvertently reveal behavioural characteristics of the sender. Bats, the second largest mammalian order, rely extensively on vocalizations owing to their nocturnal lifestyle and complex social systems, making them ideal for studying links between vocalizations and consistent behavioural traits. In this study, we developed a new testing regime to investigate whether consistent individual vocalization differences in nectarivorous bats are associated with specific behavioural types.

Functional Morphology of Hatching: Ontogeny and Distribution of Hatching Gland Cells in Red-Eyed Treefrogs and a New Marker for Anuran Hatching Enzyme.

Environmentally cued hatching (ECH) is widespread in animals and requires regulation of hatching mechanisms. Enzymatic digestion of the egg membrane is a common hatching mechanism in vertebrates and invertebrates. In amphibians and fishes, hatching enzymes (HE) are synthesized and released by hatching gland cells (HGC), whose functional ontogeny determines when hatching can occur.

The influence of lightning on insect and fungal dynamics in a lowland tropical forest.

Lightning strikes are a common source of disturbance in tropical forests, and a typical strike generates large quantities of dead wood. Lightning-damaged trees are a consistent resource for tropical saproxylic (i.e.

Plant root carbon inputs drive methane production in tropical peatlands.

Tropical peatlands are carbon-dense ecosystems that are significant sources of atmospheric methane (CH). Recent work has demonstrated the importance of trees as an emission pathway for CH from the peat to the atmosphere. However, there remain questions over the processes of CH production in these systems and how they relate to substrate supply.

Introduced Spiders in Panama: Species Distributions and New Records.

Biological invasions occur when organisms are moved from their native range and introduced into new areas, where they can spread and become a potential risk for native organisms. Invasive species are well recorded for vertebrates, plants and a number of invertebrates. A taxa for which there is a lack of information in some countries are arachnids, and this is the case of reports on introduced species in Panama.

Life history is a key driver of temporal fluctuations in tropical tree abundances.

The question of what mechanisms maintain tropical biodiversity is a critical frontier in ecology, intensified by the heightened risk of biodiversity loss faced in tropical regions. Ecological theory has shed light on multiple mechanisms that could lead to the high levels of biodiversity in tropical forests. But variation in species abundances over time may be just as important as overall biodiversity, with a more immediate connection to the risk of extirpation and biodiversity loss.

Persistent Effects of Landscape Context on Recruitment Dynamics During Secondary Succession of Tropical Forests.

Large-scale reforestation is promoted as an important strategy to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. A persistent challenge for efforts to restore ecosystems at scale is how to accelerate ecological processes, particularly natural regeneration. Yet, despite being recognized as an important barrier to the recovery of diverse plant communities in tropical agricultural landscapes, the impacts of dispersal limitation on natural regeneration in secondary forests-and especially how this changes as these forests grow older-are still poorly studied.

Putting seedlings on the map: Trade-offs in demographic rates between ontogenetic size classes in five tropical forests.

All species must partition resources among the processes that underly growth, survival, and reproduction. The resulting demographic trade-offs constrain the range of viable life-history strategies and are hypothesized to promote local coexistence. Tropical forests pose ideal systems to study demographic trade-offs as they have a high diversity of coexisting tree species whose life-history strategies tend to align along two orthogonal axes of variation: a growth-survival trade-off that separates species with fast growth from species with high survival and a stature-recruitment trade-off that separates species that achieve large stature from species with high recruitment.

Impacts of Selective Predation on Infection Prevalence and Host Susceptibility.

Predation can alter diverse ecological processes, including host-parasite interactions. Selective predation, whereby predators preferentially feed on certain prey types, can affect prey density and selective pressures. Studies on selective predation in infected populations have primarily focused on predators preferentially feeding on infected prey.

Sublethal changes to coral metabolism in response to deoxygenation.

Coastal deoxygenation poses a critical threat to tropical coral reefs. Dissolved oxygen (DO) depletion can cause hypoxia-induced stress and mortality for scleractinian corals. Coral hypoxic responses are species-specific and likely modulated by the duration and severity of low-DO conditions, although the physiological mechanisms driving hypoxia tolerance are not fully understood.

Deep cryptic diversity in the Species Group (Anura: Craugastoridae) of Isthmian Central America revealed by mitochondrial and nuclear data.

The Species Group contains eleven species of terraranan frogs distributed from eastern Honduras to eastern Panama. All species have remarkable color pattern polymorphisms, which may contribute to potential taxonomic problems. We performed exhaustive sampling throughout the geographic distribution of the group to evaluate the phylogenetic relationships and biogeographic history of all named species based on two mitochondrial markers and nuclear ddRAD loci.

Symbiosis and horizontal gene transfer promote herbivory in the megadiverse leaf beetles.

Beetles that feed on the nutritionally depauperate and recalcitrant tissues provided by the leaves, stems, and roots of living plants comprise one-quarter of herbivorous insect species. Among the key adaptations for herbivory are plant cell wall-degrading enzymes (PCWDEs) that break down the fastidious polymers in the cell wall and grant access to the nutritious cell content. While largely absent from the non-herbivorous ancestors of beetles, such PCWDEs were occasionally acquired via horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or by the uptake of digestive symbionts.

Leaf Photosynthetic and Respiratory Thermal Acclimation in Terrestrial Plants in Response to Warming: A Global Synthesis.

Leaf photosynthesis and respiration are two of the largest carbon fluxes between the atmosphere and biosphere. Although experiments examining the warming effects on photosynthetic and respiratory thermal acclimation have been widely conducted, the sensitivity of various ecosystem and vegetation types to warming remains uncertain. Here we conducted a meta-analysis on experimental observations of thermal acclimation worldwide.

Rapid radiation of a plant lineage sheds light on the assembly of dry valley biomes.

Southwest China is characterized by high plateaus, large mountain systems, and deeply incised dry valleys formed by major rivers and their tributaries. Despite the considerable attention given to alpine plant radiations in this region, the timing and mode of diversification of the numerous dry valley plant lineages remain unknown. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated the macroevolution of Isodon (Lamiaceae), a lineage commonly distributed in the dry valleys in southwest China and wetter areas of Asia and Africa.

Large-scale and long-term wildlife research and monitoring using camera traps: a continental synthesis.

Camera traps are widely used in wildlife research and monitoring, so it is imperative to understand their strengths, limitations, and potential for increasing impact. We investigated a decade of use of wildlife cameras (2012-2022) with a case study on Australian terrestrial vertebrates using a multifaceted approach. We (i) synthesised information from a literature review; (ii) conducted an online questionnaire of 132 professionals; (iii) hosted an in-person workshop of 28 leading experts representing academia, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and government; and (iv) mapped camera trap usage based on all sources.

Downscaling global reference points to assess the sustainability of local fisheries.

Multispecies coral reef fisheries are typically managed by local communities who often lack research and monitoring capacity, which prevents estimation of well-defined sustainable reference points to perform locally relevant fishery assessments. Recent research modeling coral reef fisheries globally has estimated multispecies sustainable reference points (i.e.

Statistical power and the detection of global change responses: The case of leaf production in old-growth forests.

Forests sequester a substantial portion of anthropogenic carbon emissions. Many open questions concern how. We address two of these questions.

Floodplain forests drive fruit-eating fish diversity at the Amazon Basin-scale.

Unlike most rivers globally, nearly all lowland Amazonian rivers have unregulated flow, supporting seasonally flooded floodplain forests. Floodplain forests harbor a unique tree species assemblage adapted to flooding and specialized fauna, including fruit-eating fish that migrate seasonally into floodplains, favoring expansive floodplain areas. Frugivorous fish are forest-dependent fauna critical to forest regeneration via seed dispersal and support commercial and artisanal fisheries.

Linking Functional Traits To Trophic Roles In Scavenger Assemblages.

Scavenging is a widespread feeding strategy involving a diversity of taxa from different trophic levels, from apex predators to obligate scavengers. Scavenger species play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning by removing carcasses, recycling nutrients and preventing disease spread. Understanding the trophic roles of scavenger species can help identify specialized species with unique roles and species that may be more vulnerable to ecological changes.

Land Use Change Consistently Reduces α- But Not β- and γ-Diversity of Bees.

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e.

Climate drives the long-term ant male production in a tropical community.

Forecasting insect responses to environmental variables at local and global spatial scales remains a crucial task in Ecology. However, predicting future responses requires long-term datasets, which are rarely available for insects, especially in the tropics. From 2002 to 2017, we recorded male ant incidence of 155 ant species at ten malaise traps on the 50-ha ForestGEO plot in Barro Colorado Island.

Passive accumulation of alkaloids in inconspicuously colored frogs refines the evolutionary paradigm of acquired chemical defenses.

Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended.

Frequency-dependent assembly processes determine the coexistence and relative abundance of tropical plant species.

Testing the extent to which ecological communities are structured by deterministic (niche-based) assembly processes, resulting in predictable species abundance and composition, is a fundamental goal of ecology. Here we use a 10-year dataset of 55,156 lianas comprising 86 species in an old-growth tropical forest in Panama to test whether community assembly is consistent with niche-based assembly processes. We find that species diversity and community composition was maintained because species conformed to four general requirements of coexistence theory: (1) species have negative conspecific frequency-dependent feedback that control their local population size; (2) species have a stronger negative effect on their own population than that of heterospecifics; (3) the equilibrium frequencies of species correspond to their relative abundance; and (4) species have positive invasibility.

Hormonal induction and seasonal variation in male reproductive viability of the Southern Rocky Mountain boreal toad.

The Southern Rocky Mountain boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas boreas) depends on both the rearing of wild-collected egg masses and a long-standing conservation breeding program (CBP), the latter of which heavily relies on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to support wild populations. Achieving consistent reproductive success in the CBP, however, remains a significant challenge. Natural breeding has not led to a sustained increase in reproductive capacity, prompting the exploration of exogenous hormone treatments as an alternative strategy.