The Deposit-Refund System (DRS) was introduced in Hungary in 2024 as a new element of the country’s waste management framework to strengthen circular economy objectives. Before the system implementation, consumer attitudes and expectations were explored in a large-scale survey conducted by Sz?cs et al. (2024), which identified both promising support and considerable concerns regarding the system’s economic, environmental, and practical implications. Building on this earlier research present study looks at the first year of the Hungarian DRS operation and focuses on how consumers experienced the system compared to their earlier expectations. Based on a nationwide reach consumer survey (N = 527) conducted in mid-2025, reveals that 96.6% of the respondents used the system at least once, and over 75% expressed positive or neutral experience. Overall environmental motivation and general understanding of the system were strong. However, technical problems such as machine malfunctions (reported by 72.7% of respondents) and practical issues (like limited storage space at home) still cause difficulties. Interestingly, respondents with higher environmental awareness tended to evaluate the system more positively, even when they encountered these problems. Although acceptance of the DRS has grown in some groups, ongoing challenges related to convenience, infrastructure, and communication continue to influence overall satisfaction. By comparing preliminary attitudes with implementation experiences, this study provides a systematic evaluation of the DRS’s first-year performance and offers evidence-based insights for policymakers, system operators, and stakeholders to improve effectiveness and public trust in long term.
Abstract Animal movement paths display substantial complexity and variability, promoting efforts to identify universal rules and models that best describe them. Using high‐resolution (≥10 Hz) movement from 43 vertebrate species spanning diverse taxa, body sizes, and lifestyles, we show that paths are universally composed of straight‐line steps interspersed with sharp turns, echoing patterns documented in lower taxa such as bacteria. We report how vertebrate “fundamental steps”—straight travel segments between successive detected turns (with F stepduration as the turn‐to‐turn interval and F steplength as the corresponding distance when displacement is available)—and “fundamental turn angles” ( F turnangles ; net changes in travel heading between successive steps) vary with species' mass, locomotor mode, behavior, and environment. Here, “fundamental” denotes the finest scale step/turn events resolvable under our sampling rate and turn‐detection criteria; these event‐scale steps/turns are intrinsically different from the straight‐line segments inferred from low‐resolution position data. To explain these relationships, we posit that animals inherently move in a straight line until sensory information signals a better heading, triggering a turn. Across all species examined, animals spent the vast majority of their travel time moving in straight lines (species‐level means >90%), with turns representing discrete decision points influenced by body size, locomotor mode, and ecological context. Larger animals turned less frequently, consistent with biomechanical constraints of mass and rotational inertia, while aerial species often exhibited higher turning rates driven by soaring flight demands. We further show that turns can be linked to diverse behavioral drivers, including prey pursuit, obstacle avoidance, predator evasion, and exploitation of environmental energy. By explicitly quantifying turns, we clarify how distributions of step durations and turn angles interact to shape movement patterns and why different statistical models (e.g., correlated random walks, Lévy flights) emerge when lower resolution data are analyzed. Finally, we demonstrate how fundamental steps and turns can be incorporated into an agent‐based modeling framework using penguins as a case study, enabling reconstruction of realistic tracks and prediction of movement responses to environmental change. Straight‐line travel punctuated by decision‐driven turns thus emerges as a fundamental principle of vertebrate movement, linking fine‐scale movement structure, ecological context, and emergent patterns of space use.
Abstract While most research on nutrient cycling has focused on plant–soil interactions or soil decomposers, recent studies highlight the emerging role of terrestrial mammals in contributing to biogeochemical cycles, a field known as zoogeochemistry. More than half of all mammal species are found in tropical forests, ecosystems currently experiencing high rates of defaunation. In this context, ongoing defaunation may limit our understanding of the role mammals play in nutrient cycling in these diverse ecosystems. To investigate the effects of ground‐dwelling mammals on nutrient cycling in tropical forests, we conducted a field experiment in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil using a long‐term (14‐year) mammal exclusion experiment. Over 1 year, we monitored terrestrial mammals, estimated their biomass using a mammalian biomass index, and collected litter and soil samples during the dry and wet seasons. The mammalian biomass index was dominated by large frugivores (peccaries, red brocket deer, and lowland tapir) but also included small‐ and medium‐sized mammals. Season emerged as the dominant driver of variation in litter and soil properties, and spatial heterogeneity among plot pairs also accounted for a substantial portion of this variation. In contrast, the effects of mammalian biomass were more limited and interacted with seasonality. Mammalian biomass reduced litter lignin, increased litter diversity and potassium content across seasons, and increased soil pH. These changes likely represent short‐term responses of belowground systems to the physical impacts of ground‐dwelling frugivorous mammals, such as foraging and bioturbation, rather than long‐term shifts in vegetation composition. Together, these results suggest that ground‐dwelling mammals may accelerate nutrient cycling in tropical forests.
Abstract Earth's ecological dynamics are largely rhythmic, tied to regular cycles such as seasons, lunar phases, days, or tides. Subdisciplines of ecology such as phenology have developed specific concepts and metrics adapted to describe and analyze cyclical dynamics, but they operate in a largely unidimensional framework. There is therefore a lack of suitable tools for describing cyclical ecological dynamics in multidimensional spaces. Here, we introduce Cyclical Ecological Trajectory Analysis (CETA), an extension of Ecological Trajectory Analysis, allowing for describing and comparing cyclical dynamics in a multidimensional context without dimensionality reduction. CETA provides metrics to quantify cycles' geometry and resemblance in a multidimensional space of interest and offers a multidimensional equivalent of the concept of phenological advance and delays. We provide four ecological examples demonstrating how CETA can be useful to study different cyclical dynamics (seasons, days, tides), using different data (community composition, environmental data) and in different contexts (observational or experimental). We also show how CETA can be articulated with methods of multiscale analysis for time series. We conclude by summarizing the advantages and limitations of the method, its wide range of potential applications, as well as its connections and synergies with other, already available, aspects of the Ecological Trajectory Analysis framework.
Abstract Microbial communities contribute to numerous processes that profoundly impact planetary and human health. They therefore hold potential for addressing many of today's pressing global challenges. Microbial ecosystems have been studied at many levels, ranging from the molecular processes of individual cells to the emergent properties and functions of the entire collective. One notable complexity of these ecosystems is that microbes are constantly engaged in interactions with their environment and other microbes, which in turn influences not only their own growth but also community function, assembly, and stability. While interactions are very often the subject of contemporary microbiology research, these studies often lack precise, mechanistically rooted characterizations of these interactions. In this article, we propose strategies to overcome such limitations by providing a conceptual framework for describing microbe–microbe interactions and discussing the implications of this framework for the study of microbial communities and their evolution. Starting from basic principles, we build a mechanistic description of microbial interactions that treats each interaction as a series of modular, interconnected subprocesses. We then examine how this modularity shapes microbial communities and their evolution, as well as how this modularity can improve our approaches for characterizing and mathematically modeling microbial ecosystems.
Natural mineral soil amendments are receiving renewed attention in organic and regenerative viticulture because they can connect traditional local resources with soil remediation, soil-life restoration and climate adaptation. This partly protocol-based scoping narrative review synthesises evidence on rock powders, zeolites, clays, carbonates, gypsum, perlite, vermiculite, alginite and humic mineral materials. The review evaluates their roles in nutrient buffering, pH and cation-exchange regulation, water retention, microbial habitat formation, heavy-metal immobilisation and carbon-stabilising soil structure. It argues that mineral amendments are most effective when used with organic matter, cover crops, reduced tillage and locally adapted vineyard-floor management, rather than as stand-alone substitutes for fertilisers. Comparative tables and decision matrices are provided to link amendment choice to soil pH, texture, salinity, contamination risk, climate stress and organic certification rules. The paper highlights Central European resources, especially volcanic and organic-mineral deposits, while placing them in a global viticultural and agroecological context. The main limitations are slow and site-dependent nutrient release, potential contamination, over-mineralisation, extraction and transport impacts, cost, and uneven field evidence in vineyards. Future research should prioritise long-term replicated vineyard trials, microbial and rhizosphere indicators, life-cycle assessment and practical guidance for certified organic farms.
Researchers increasingly encounter the term ecosystem when discussing short rotation coppice (SRC) on agricultural land. It is used even though the basic literature has never precisely defined this ecosystem and determined its classification as a forest or agroecosystem. The study was based on official catalogues of biotopes and plant communities in Central and Eastern Europe (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary), as well as on our 15-year research in Slovakia. We evaluated (i) the structure and functions of forests, agroecosystems, and SRCs, and (ii) their ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem disservices (EDS). Individual characteristics and processes were assessed and compared using principal component analysis. It was found that 50% of the evaluated structural and functional properties of SRCs are similar to forests and 40% to agroecosystems (10% are significantly transitional). In the case of ES and EDS, the similarity of SRC was 10% to forests and 20% to agroecosystems, with a strongly transitional state found in 70% of cases. SRC has a tree layer (canopy) with the characteristics of forest stands, and the herb layer is mainly formed by species from agroecosystems, whose development is, however, limited and they grow near their pessimum (lower light intensity, etc.). SRC can be considered a new, transitional type of ecosystem that cannot be clearly assigned to existing categories. This finding is relevant not only for ecology but also for economics and has practical implications for ecosystem classification, land-use legislation, and conflict resolution between farmers and foresters.
Abstract Mutualistic interactions play a fundamental role in shaping species distributions, driving niche differentiation, and structuring communities. Yet their influence on realized niches and patterns of coexistence remains poorly understood. In clownfishes, mutualism with sea anemones underpins their biogeography and ecological success, with species classified as generalists or specialists according to their host specificity. However, the extent to which host availability constrains or expands clownfish niches has remained unclear. Here we used ecological niche models (ENMs) across the Indo‐Pacific to examine how host sea anemones shape clownfish realized niches and community composition. We integrated occurrence data with climatic and habitat predictors and refined estimates by incorporating host niches, quantifying changes in niche breadth, position, and overlap. We further developed a multilayered framework to account for host use within niche quantification, allowing us to assess patterns of resource overlap in communities spanning generalist–specialist dynamics. Our results reveal that mutualistic associations strongly shape clownfish realized niches, with specialists experiencing greater niche constraints than generalists due to their reliance on a limited set of hosts. Host availability emerges as a key driver of community structure, producing high ecological niche overlap among species that is modulated by host partitioning. This host‐mediated differentiation facilitates coexistence by reducing resource overlap, with the degree of specialization playing a central role in sustaining clownfish biodiversity. Our study highlights how biotic interactions mediate species ecological niches and shape community assembly in an iconic mutualistic system. Beyond clownfishes, our framework offers a transferable approach to incorporate interacting species into ENMs, improving ecological interpretations and informing conservation efforts in other mutualistic systems.
Abstract Knowledge of evolutionary patterns and genetic variation across a species' range is important for determining conservation and management strategies. The Arctic is the fastest‐warming ecosystem on Earth and has already reached temperature increases not expected in the rest of the world until the end of the century. Consequently, synthesizing patterns of evolutionary and genetic change in Arctic species will be instructive for understanding future change in other systems. Here, we present a literature review of peer‐reviewed published research exploring evolutionary processes in polar bears, a sentinel species for climate action. The wealth of knowledge generated from the long‐term monitoring of polar bears has provided data for exploring patterns of evolutionary change associated with climate change. Warming temperatures have led to significant reductions in sea ice coverage and availability, contributing to declines in genetic variation in some, but not all, polar bear subpopulations. Natural selection driven by warming and selective subsistence harvests may be contributing to the evolution of smaller body sizes in polar bears. However, evidence of adaptive change in polar bears remains limited, despite clear behavioral and phenological plasticity in the species in response to changing sea ice conditions. Following our review, we suggest pathways for identifying the effects of climate warming on the evolution and genetic variation in polar bears, which may improve strategies for locally supported conservation and management decisions. Our results highlight the general complexity of predicting the consequences of warming for wide‐ranging, genetically structured, and adaptively specialized species such as polar bears, and underscore the importance of developing evolutionarily informed management and conservation priorities for species threatened by climate change.
Harvest-time conditions can vary considerably within a single day, yet their influence on wine aroma development is still not fully understood. In this study, the effect of thermal conditions at harvest—comparing night and midday picking—was examined in relation to the volatile composition and sensory expression of Hárslevel? wines from the Tokaj region. The work is considered within the broader context of low-input and climate-adaptive winemaking, although no direct environmental measurements were performed. Grapes were harvested on the same day, either during the night under cool pre-dawn conditions (18 °C) or at midday under higher ambient temperatures (28 °C), and processed using controlled microvinification protocols. Bioprotection with Metschnikowia pulcherrima was applied either alone or in combination with SO?. Volatile compounds were analysed by HS-SPME–GC–MS on a semi-quantitative basis, and the resulting dataset was evaluated using exploratory multivariate approaches. Sensory assessment followed OIV guidelines and was interpreted primarily as descriptive qualitative evaluation. Across treatments, wines produced from night-harvested grapes were more often associated with volatile compounds linked to fresh, floral and citrus-related sensory attributes. By contrast, wines obtained from midday-harvested grapes tended to show riper aromatic profiles together with higher perceived acidity. The use of bioprotection was associated with a greater diversity of fermentation-derived aroma compounds; however, it did not eliminate the differentiation related to harvest-time conditions. A similar pattern was observed in the sensory data, where wines from night-harvested grapes were generally described as having higher aromatic purity, freshness and overall harmony. Taken together, these observations point to a potential role of harvest-time conditions—including temperature and associated environmental factors—in shaping aromatic expression in dry white wines. Under the conditions of this study, cooler harvest conditions—especially when combined with bioprotection—appear to support aroma preservation and stylistic balance. At the same time, the study did not include direct measurements of environmental performance. For this reason, any interpretation of these practices as climate-adaptive should be understood in a conceptual and process-oriented sense, rather than as quantitatively demonstrated sustainability outcomes.
Tokaji natural sweet wines are climate-sensitive cultural-heritage products. Their production depends on Botrytis cinerea, autumn humidity, dry ripening periods and grape varieties authorized by the Tokaj PDO, while their market future depends on consumer learning, gastronomy, wine tourism and regional sustainability. This exploratory mixed-methods study reframes consumer acceptance of Tokaji sweet wines as a socio-ecological resilience problem. A structured narrative review of peer-reviewed and official sources was combined with an anonymous cross-sectional online survey of Hungarian adult wine consumers not working in viticulture or winemaking (N=100; 30 July 2024-26 August 2024). Respondents were classified as current Tokaji sweet-wine consumers/buyers (n=37), rejecters (n=43) and potential consumers (n=20). Likert-scale variables were analysed by descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis tests, Holm-adjusted Mann-Whitney comparisons and Spearman rank correlations. Flavour was the most important wine-choice factor in all groups (mean 4.73-4.80/5) but did not differ significantly between groups (H=0.12, p=0.944). Group differences were strongest for sweet-wine beliefs: rejecters agreed more with the statement "I do not like the flavour of sweet wine" (mean 3.21) than current consumers (mean 1.41), while current consumers attached higher symbolic and gift value to Tokaji sweet specialities. Because the sample was small, urban, highly educated and non-representative, the results should be interpreted as pilot evidence. The paper proposes a regenerative wine-tourism and consumer-education model linking product knowledge, food pairing, heritage interpretation and climate-adaptive viticulture to the resilience of the Tokaj cultural landscape.
The Slovak automotive sector is a major contributor to the national economy and hosts several Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with diverse production profiles. Increasing environmental and sustainability commitments have reshaped production strategies and accelerated the adoption of cleaner technologies. Environmental Performance Indicators (EPIs) provide a quantitative basis for assessing plant-level environmental efficiency and benchmarking against Best Available Techniques (BAT) defined in the BAT Reference Document for Surface Treatment using Solvents (BAT STS BREF). This study presents a quantitative, observational comparison of plant- and paint-shop-level EPIs for three OEMs operating in Slovakia in 2024. The analysis covers energy consumption, carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions, volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, water consumption, wastewater generation, and waste generation, normalised per complete vehicle and, where relevant, per painted vehicle body and per square metre of coated surface. Substantial inter-factory variability was observed, with paint-shop operations identified as the primary driver of performance differences. OEM 2 demonstrated the strongest overall environmental performance, recording the lowest CO2e emissions (0.08 t CO2e·veh-1), lowest VOC emissions (8.66 g VOC·m-2), and relatively low water use and wastewater generation, while meeting most BAT benchmarks for energy (0.46 MWh·veh-1), water per coated body, and VOC emissions. However, OEM 2 also generated the highest plant-level waste (186 kg·veh-1). In contrast, OEM 3 exhibited the weakest performance, with the highest energy consumption (1.35 MWh·veh-1), plant-level water use (3.10 m3·veh-1), and wastewater discharges (plant-level: 2.81 m3·veh-1; paint shop: 1.55 m3·veh-1), and failed to meet BAT benchmarks for paint-shop waste generation (26.05 kg·veh-1) and water use (1.9 m3·veh-1). Although energy use per painted body and VOC emissions remained within BAT-associated levels, none of the OEMs complied with indicative BAT benchmarks for waste generation. This study provides the first cross-OEM, plant-level EPI benchmarking of the Slovak automotive sector and highlights the need for harmonised, industry-wide EPI reporting to support transparency and continuous improvement.
In recent decades, the role of horses has increasingly shifted toward sport and leisure, resulting in heightened attention to their long-term health and welfare. Parallel to a broader interest in natural therapies, the application of herbal medicine in equine care has gained momentum. Commonly used medicinal plants - such as Harpagophytum procumbens (devil’s claw), Matricaria chamomilla (chamomile), Taraxacum officinale (dandelion), and Allium sativum (garlic) - are employed to support digestive, immune, and musculoskeletal functions. Although generally considered safe, some herbs may elicit side effects, necessitating professional guidance in their administration. Hungary possesses a longstanding tradition in medicinal plant cultivation, facilitated by favorable pedoclimatic conditions. The country is divided into six principal cultivation zones and remains a key European producer, particularly of chamomile. Despite its ecological benefits - such as enhancing agro-biodiversity and promoting organic agriculture - the sector faces several challenges, including labor shortages, market fluctuations, and environmental concerns such as overharvesting and climate change. Sustainable cultivation practices and increased ecological awareness are critical for the resilience and future of this field. As a supplement to our work, we prepared a questionnaire for domestic horse owners regarding the use of medicinal herbs. Our questionnaire-based study revealed that the majority of horse owners are familiar with, and actively utilize, herbal products, primarily for managing respiratory, musculoskeletal, and gastrointestinal conditions. The significance of using medicinal herbs in horses is also supported by the results of two of our previously published experiments. In these two controlled feeding trials, we demonstrated that specific herbal mixtures, administered in dried or fermented form, significantly improved the digestibility of crude fiber, crude protein, and dry matter. The preparations were well tolerated, with no adverse effects observed. These findings suggest that phytotherapeutic supplementation may offer a viable, natural strategy to support equine gastrointestinal health. However, further research is warranted to optimize herbal formulations and to evaluate efficacy across larger, more diverse equine populations.
The tyre-derived transformation product 6PPD-quinone (6PPD-q) poses a growing threat to aquatic ecosystems, particularly sensitive salmonid species. However, practical and affordable treatment options remain limited. This study investigated the potential of sewage-sludge-based activated carbon (SBAC) produced via ZnCl2 activation and pyrolysis as a sustainable adsorbent for removing 6PPD-q from contaminated water and advancing circular-economy approaches for sludge valorisation. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy revealed the presence of oxygen-containing surface groups on SBAC that can facilitate hydrogen bonding and p–p interactions with 6PPD-q. Batch adsorption experiments were performed to evaluate equilibrium behaviour and thermodynamic properties under controlled conditions. Results showed rapid uptake, achieving >99% removal from an initial concentration of 200 microg/L within 0.5 h at pH 3.5. The Langmuir model best fit the equilibrium data, with R2 value of 0.95, yielding a maximum adsorption capacity of 583.3 microg/g. Thermodynamic analysis indicated a spontaneous and endothermic process, suggesting chemisorption as the dominant mechanism. The adsorption efficiency remained stable within the temperature range of 7°C–35°C, and sequential treatments maintained high removal performance. The experimental results demonstrate that SBAC is an efficient and low-cost adsorbent for mitigating 6PPD-q contamination in stormwater, offering a sustainable solution for valorising sewage sludge within circular economy frameworks.
The global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is reshaping labor markets while simultaneously offering significant environmental benefits. This study provides the first Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that integrates evidence across diverse geographic contexts, a broad range of renewable energy technologies, and multiple labor market outcomes, including job creation, job quality, skills development, and distributional effects, while explicitly incorporating associated environmental co-benefits and trade-offs. The review assesses key labor market implications of the energy transition, including sectoral employment shifts and workforce reskilling needs. The findings indicate that renewable energy deployment generally leads to net job gains, particularly in solar, wind, and hydropower sectors, and supports more inclusive labor market opportunities, including marginalized groups. However, the distribution of these gains remains uneven across regions, with fossil fuel–dependent areas facing employment risks and requiring targeted support. Beyond the socioeconomic dimension, the review shows that the expansion of green jobs contributes to broader sustainability goals by reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality, and enhancing ecosystem resilience. The study further highlights the critical role of education systems, skills development, and policy instruments, such as carbon pricing and local employment incentives, in enabling a just and environmentally restorative energy transition.
Understanding how species distributions respond to environmental change is a key question in ecology and evolution. While many species are shifting their ranges, the mechanisms driving the extent and rate of these shifts, and the consequences of their establishment in a novel environment, are often poorly understood. Particularly interesting groups of organisms to study in this context are those that have shifted their distributions faster than warming average temperatures alone can explain. Our study investigates whether adaptation to colder temperatures in novel northern environments-and associated life history trade-offs across different life stages-explains this apparent mismatch between climate change and the pace of range expansion. Unlike many range-expanding taxa, our focal species, the wasp spider Argiope bruennichi, disperses passively via ballooning, and as a generalist mesopredator, its expansion is not limited by host plant availability and can exert significant bottom-up and top-down ecosystem effects, making it of particular interest. We integrated analyses of adult phenology, morphology, offspring cold tolerance, and genome-wide variation to test which traits are likely driven by adaptation to colder conditions or whether phenotypic plasticity drives the rapid northward expansion. Females matured earlier at smaller sizes at the range edge. The lack of a concurrent reduction in fecundity suggests that genetic adaptation plays a role. Hatched juveniles that overwintered in their egg sacs were subjected to a reciprocal common garden experiment that simulated either core or edge winter temperatures. Edge-origin spiderlings exhibited lower overall overwinter survival, but the surviving ones had lower lethal temperatures and enhanced supercooling ability than their core-origin counterparts. Furthermore, metabolomic profiles revealed that cold stress-induced accumulation of amino acids and myo-inositol likely contributes to improved cold tolerance. A genome-wide analysis delineated two distinct genetic clusters across Europe, separated by central Germany, and showed that genetic variation is linked to winter climate and seasonality gradients. Overall, our data support genetic differentiation as a major driver of the observed differences, coupled with considerable phenotypic plasticity. Our integrated approach underscores the necessity of assessing trait evolution across life stages to understand how organisms overcome climatic barriers, thus elucidating the mechanisms underlying rapid range expansion.
The elemental composition of organisms (i.e., the elementome) directly constrains metabolic machinery and aligns with functional traits, linking organismal performance to nutrient cycling and energy flow at the ecosystem level. In theory, elemental diversity captures the community functional heterogeneity by quantifying variation in the multidimensional elementomes of co-occurring species within a community. However, empirical evidence connecting organismal elemental diversity to ecosystem functioning and identifying its environmental controls remains scarce. We compiled an unprecedented dataset on plant elemental concentrations, encompassing more than 2500 species and 14 analyzed elements (including macronutrients, micronutrients, and trace elements) sampled from leaves, stems, trunks, and fine roots across 8 biomes and 72 sites, covering multiple ecosystem types including forests and grasslands. Using these data, we investigated the spatial patterns and drivers of plant elemental diversity and evaluated its relationship with ecosystem productivity and stability. Our results indicate that plant elemental diversity decreased with latitude, with interannual variability in temperature and mean annual precipitation as the primary controls on its spatial distribution. Moreover, ecosystems with higher plant elemental diversity exhibit greater efficiency in the use of carbon, water, and light, thereby translating into higher productivity and greater temporal stability across and within forests and grasslands, and these effects persisted even after accounting for climate and soil factors. Taken together, our results support the influence of plant elemental diversity as a distinct dimension of biodiversity with functional implications. Complementing trait- and taxonomy-based measures, plant elemental diversity improves predictions of ecosystem productivity and temporal stability under ongoing climatic variability, and can substantially advance research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
Rapid evolution can influence competitive dynamics. While theory and past work have focused on the competitive consequences of rapid evolution in response to competitors (e.g., character displacement), abiotic environmental factors are also responsible for much of the rapid evolution observed in nature. Yet, we lack knowledge of how evolution in response to a variable abiotic environment shapes competition between evolving species. Our knowledge of these effects is limited not only by the absence of direct quantification of environment-driven evolution's effects on competition, but also by the rarity of systems in which environment-driven evolution itself has been measured across multiple competitors. Here, we used an outdoor mesocosm experiment with three species of naturally co-occurring drosophilid fly competitors to quantify seasonal evolution of stress tolerance and reproductive traits and the effects of this evolution on demographic performance under competition. We found that rapid seasonal evolution occurred across all three species, across all measured traits, and across every sampling interval. Throughout the course of their growing season, species first converged on similar phenotypic profiles (e.g., high heat tolerance and low fecundity), then evolved in parallel. This seasonal evolution had clear impacts on pairwise competition between species. In competition trials in a common garden greenhouse environment, seasonal evolution had the potential to alter competitive fitness, measured as species' demographic performance during one full generation of competition, by over 30%. Under seasonally varying field conditions over the summer, in one species pair, seasonal evolution combined with changing environmental conditions had 7x stronger effects on competitive fitness than did the changing environmental conditions alone. Our work highlights that the rapid, environment-driven evolution increasingly documented by evolutionary biologists can have an underappreciated influence on ecological competitive dynamics.
Safeguarding biodiversity requires a detailed understanding of the biosphere, especially regarding the distribution and state of habitats. Citizen science data offer a rich source of useful information, but they usually only contain partial records of species assemblages, as predominantly opportunistic observations of individual species are reported. We explored the capacity of recommender systems-a class of algorithms originally developed for tasks like recommending movies to users on streaming platforms-to fill gaps in citizen science data and assign unreported plant species to partial assemblages, using opportunistic presence-only observations as training data. We employed a hierarchical Poisson factorization (HPF) model to learn distributions exclusively from pixel-wise pooled observations, which were synthesized to a site-by-species matrix of a dimension of c. 80,000 & times; 2000 covering Switzerland. Based on about 1500 independent surveys, we assessed HPF's capacity to predict held-out species and compared these to predictions from traditional species distribution models (SDMs). Moreover, we investigated HPF's latent features, that is, its low-dimensional summaries of the similarity in species' occurrence across sites and the similarity in site suitability for species. Indicator species of most broad habitat categories distinguished in Switzerland clustered significantly in species-related latent feature space, indicating a high capacity of HPF to approximate co-occurrence. Patterns in site-related latent features were primarily explained by climate, soil, and topography. However, about 40% of the signal could not be attributed to gridded predictors and likely mirrors small-scale differences, for example, due to disturbances like those experienced in ruderal habitats. Predictive performance of HPF was close to that of SDMs if 20 (or 49% by median) species were observed at a site. However, when ensembling predictions of HPF and SDMs, performance could be improved for sites with >= 6 species observed. HPF predictions performed comparably well in disturbed habitats like roadside vegetation and comparably poorly in habitats experiencing elevated environmental filtering, such as subalpine forests. Given their ability to efficiently learn the distribution of entire floras based on presence-only data, their unique capacity to obtain generalized co-occurrence proxies from partial inventories, and their potential to boost distributional predictions, recommender systems can valuably contribute to improving our understanding of the biosphere.
