The beaded periwinkle (Cenchritis muricatus) inhabits supratidal rocky environments characterized by strong gradients in salinity, desiccation, and hydrodynamic disturbance. Preliminary observations suggested that individuals leave dry rocks more frequently when surrounded by seawater than freshwater, prompting an exploratory investigation of environmental cues potentially underlying this behaviour. Pilot experiments were conducted in which periwinkles were placed on isolated dry rocks surrounded by either seawater or freshwater. Additional treatments varied in rock size, orientation, surface characteristics, and water depth. Across experiments, periwinkles left rocks surrounded by seawater more frequently than those surrounded by freshwater, although effect sizes varied and interactions with other factors were inconsistent. High variance and limited replication constrained statistical inference; therefore, the results are interpreted primarily in a descriptive and hypothesis-generating context. The observed pattern suggests that rock departure may not be driven by immediate habitat benefits but rather by sensitivity to contextual cues associated with seawater exposure. Such cues could signal an elevated risk of disturbance in natural supratidal environments. These findings highlight the importance of spatial scale in behavioural ecology and motivate future studies incorporating connected substrates and field-based validation to clarify how supratidal gastropods interpret environmental signals.

Urbanization often leads to the homogenization of species composition in aquatic ecosystems, as it introduces disturbances that can destroy the habitats of unique endemic or native species while creating alternative habitats for species capable of adapting to these conditions. This study utilized a long-term dataset from 1971 to 2010, focusing on fish species presence within three watersheds of the Greater Toronto Area, Canada. The objective was to evaluate any changes in fish communities over time across three groups of species assemblages: native, non-native species, and a combining of all species. We considered key predictor variables for which data exist: catchment area, distance to a species pool source (Lake Ontario), and percentage of urban cover, to determine their impacts on species richness over time. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) the rate of change in species richness differs among the three groups; (2) urbanization promotes the spread and homogenization of non-native species distribution; and (3) native species assemblages exhibit high nestedness initially, decreasing over time as non-native species established and replaced native species. We used general linear models and the nestedness analysis to characterize matrices of species distributions of native and non-native fish assemblages among the catchments over time. Overall, the results indicate that nestedness temperatures (NTs) for native fish were lower compared to non-native fish assemblages. Over the four decades studied, native species richness declined with increasing urban cover, while non-native species richness increased and compensated for native losses. Furthermore, native species assemblages exhibited high nestedness at the beginning of the record period, which decreased over time as non-native species became established and replaced native species. This trend suggests that further changes in fish communities are probable. As native fish communities become patchier (not nested), this process may accelerate, potentially isolating communities and making them more prone to perturbations.

A functional group approach to analyzing ecological processes calls for aggregating species populations' data (e.g., biomass, abundance) into larger functional units. This method offers a more direct insight into the coarse community and ecosystem dynamics than a species level. Since aggregation changes the scale of analysis, it is reasonable to expect that the results and inferences will also change. To gauge the nature and size of this effect, we examined two sets of communities using the same methodology at taxonomic and functional levels. We asked how asynchrony among constituent populations stabilizes the regional biomass or abundance in two systems: zooplankton in North American temperate lakes and rock pool invertebrates in Jamaica. We aggregated species into pairs by organism size for the functional level analysis because it correlates well with life history traits. We hypothesized that taxonomical and functional level analyses would yield different pictures and inferences. We analyzed asynchrony among local populations, metapopulations, and populations of different species at different locations. We found that in lakes, different asynchrony classes contributed to the stabilization of the regional metric than in the rock pools. We further found that aggregation of taxa into functional units changed the pattern of differences between lakes and rock pools revealed by taxonomical analysis and that each set of communities responded differently to species lumping. While aggregating taxa leads to different results, the taxonomic and functional lenses add new insights to the biological interpretation of mechanisms stabilizing communities when interpreted jointly. Specifically, population asynchrony-a known stabilizing factor-can provide complementary stabilizing mechanisms when seen through taxonomic and functional lenses. Without exposing these modes, inferences about abundance/biomass/richness stabilizing contributions arising from asynchrony will remain tenuous. Exposing these modes offers a path for significant breakthroughs in linking local, spatial, and functional structures to multispecies system dynamics.

Context-dependency, C-D, of outcomes occurs when several factors affect a focal metric. Remedies for treating milder cases of C-D are readily available but severe cases, where some contributory factors cause non-linear changes in others, escaped routine scrutiny. This poses a universal challenge to standard research strategies. We suggest that metacommunity framework may be particularly vulnerable because its core notions (habitat structure, dispersal, and species interactions) are functionally entangled. When these notions are generalized to include many species and situations, they become interdependent. To illustrate the significance of such interdependence, we test two hypotheses. One that holding combination of parameters constant in all but one dimension, can alter inference of a study and the second that the severity of context-dependency increases when core metacommunity dimensions interact and transform one another through a variety of mechanisms. The results support these ideas and imply that C-D predicts a dauntingly vast space of possible empirical outcomes and interpretations, most of which can arise from reciprocal interactions among metacommunity core dimensions. We proffer that an adaptable and structured use of macro-variables is a place to start investigating metacommunity mechanisms more efficiently.

EDITORIAL article Front. Ecol. Evol., 25 March 2024Sec. Population, Community, and Ecosystem Dynamics Volume 12 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2024.1392926

Habitat fragmentation is often assumed to negatively impact species diversity because smaller, more isolated populations on smaller habitat patches are at a higher extinction risk. However, some empirical and theoretical studies suggest that landscapes with numerous small habitat patches may support higher species richness, although the circumstances remain elusive. We used an agent-based metacommunity model to investigate this and simulate landscapes of the same total area but diverse patch sizes. Our model, as generic and unbiased by specific assumptions as possible, aimed to explore which circumstances may be more conducive to supporting higher biodiversity. To this end, most parameters and behaviors were random. The model included generalized species traits, dispersal, and interactions to explore species richness dynamics in fragmented landscapes of distinct patch sizes. Our results show that landscapes with many small patches maintain higher species richness than those with fewer large patches. Moreover, the relationship between patch connectivity and species richness is more pronounced in landscapes with smaller patches. High connectivity in these landscapes may support species diversity by preventing local extinctions and facilitating recolonization. In contrast, connectivity is less significant in large-patch landscapes, where generalist species dominate. The findings highlight the complex interplay between patch size quality, connectivity, species traits, and diverse interactions among species in determining species richness. We suggest the patterns produced by the model represent null predictions and may be useful as a reference for a diversity of more specialized questions and predictions. These insights may also have specific implications for conservation strategies, suggesting that maintaining a mosaic of small, well-connected patches could enhance biodiversity in fragmented landscapes.

For millenia, humans have modified aspects of natural ecosystems to meet their social, economic and ecological needs. With advancing technology and global movement of species, modification has shifted to designing and creating new ecologies in cityscapes, building interiors, agricultural settings and more. We call intentional ecosystems that combine biodiversity and technology with little to no shared history, synthetic ecosystems. Fields, from microbial ecology to agroecology, build synthetic ecosystems under different names but share the same properties of: Being human‐designed, assembled and controlled, having novel components and/or interactions, and creating systems distinctly different from what came before at a site. Creating synthetic ecosystems represents a design challenge, but also an opportunity for real‐world impact – which we illustrate with a biodiverse, indoor synthetic ecosystem for food production. Overall, synthetic ecosystems may advance socioecological goals in six ways. They can: 1) replace ecological deadzones with living systems (e.g. building green roofs), 2) enhance existing ecosystem processes (e.g. boosting agricultural yields), 3) create new ecosystem functions (e.g. bioelectricity), 4) establish new ecosystem controls (e.g. biological control), 5) foster knowledge synthesis (e.g. testing ecological theory) and 6) reshape human‐nature relationships (e.g. improve wellbeing). To realize these potentials, future work must more fully evaluate whereandwhen synthetic ecosystems are appropriate to build, whatarchitectures and aspects of diversity (biological and technological) make them most functional and how knowledge from across cultures and eras can be integrated in solutions.

The rockpool cluster offers unique characteristics making it a model system for general questions in ecology: (1) all rockpools share biotic history (any species can reach any rockpool); (2) they form a strong gradient of conditions from benign to harsh; (3) 1-day sampling across all rockpools ensures census consistency; (4) rockpools respond to changing conditions within a short (days) time frame; (5) they are easy to manipulate (note: the data are from an unmanipulated rockpool subset), and (6) they may act as a single metacommunity that exhibits consistent species distribution patterns on a broader scale (unpublished). Consequently, the rockpools continue generating insights, with the first publications in 1996. The data represent an intensive rockpool metacommunity monitoring project, making them of considerable value to our understanding of tropical coastal metacommunity dynamics and general ecological processes. The dataset covers surveys of invertebrate fauna in 49, primarily supratidal, rockpools on a fossil coral reef over 25 years. All rockpools occur within a 73 × 47 m array of rocks at a distance of less than 2 m from the nearest neighbor. About 200 other rockpools occur on the same area. They are in a sheltered bay (Discovery Bay, Jamaica) between 0 and 5 m from the ocean. Typically, rockpools are 5-30 cm deep and 40 cm across on average, with elevation from a few centimeters to 300 cm above sea level. Rockpools may drain excess water from precipitation or waves into other rockpools, which allows organisms to disperse passively downstream. Of the 49 rockpools in the survey, 35 are subject to occasional drying up, while the others appear permanent. Most collections (1989-2004) were annual censuses of invertebrate populations, exceeding a total of 475,000 invertebrates counted, with only minor record gaps. In all cases, species level taxonomic information consists of detailed photographs. In some cases, notes are included with the taxonomic data where species identification could not be matched to information available in the literature. Samples from 2005 to 2019 still require organism identification. Abiotic parameters were measured the day before biotic sampling took place as the process of biotic sampling can impact abiotic parameters through stirring, oxygenation and filtering (temperature, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, light intensity, salinity, alkalinity, and nutrients). The cumulative richness in the metacommunity consist of 78 freshwater, marine, and brackish water taxa, with a mean richness per rockpool of 5.5 distinct species. Regarding taxonomic makeup, ostracods dominated in both diversity and number, followed by copepods, and insects. There are no copyright restrictions on the data set; please cite this data paper when using these data in publications.

Synthesis research in ecology and environmental science improves understanding, advances theory, identifies research priorities, and supports management strategies by linking data, ideas, and tools. Accelerating environmental challenges increases the need to focus synthesis science on the most pressing questions. To leverage input from the broader research community, we convened a virtual workshop with participants from many countries and disciplines to examine how and where synthesis can address key questions and themes in ecology and environmental science in the coming decade. Seven priority research topics emerged: (1) diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ), (2) human and natural systems, (3) actionable and use-inspired science, (4) scale, (5) generality, (6) complexity and resilience, and (7) predictability. Additionally, two issues regarding the general practice of synthesis emerged: the need for increased participant diversity and inclusive research practices; and increased and improved data flow, access, and skill-building. These topics and practices provide a strategic vision for future synthesis in ecology and environmental science.

Using accurate and precise species-specific parameters in mechanistic models can lead to better predictions of population dynamics and ecosystem function (e.g. nutrient cycling) across a range of environmental conditions. Zooplankton are important in the aquatic food web and for nutrient cycling but are highly diverse, and there is only limited information on specific species. Knowledge of species-specific attributes is patchy. In particular, tropical species are underrepresented in this regard. Here, we gather all the known information about a wide-spread tropical zooplankton member, Ceriodaphnia rigaudi , and add new information from lab and field experiments. We determine feeding rate across a range of food concentrations and food-dependent population growth rate of C. rigaudi . Additionally, we use 16 years of occurrence data from rock pools in Jamaica to explore environmental characteristics of the habitat in which C. rigaudi live. We compare our data to worldwide records of the species attributes and create a reference map of its occurrence.

Resilience, the capacity for a system to bounce-back after a perturbation, is critical for conservation and restoration efforts.Different functional traits have differential effects on system-level resilience.We test this experimentally in a lab system consisting of algae consumed by zooplankton, snails, or both, using an eutrophication event as a perturbation.We examined seston settlement load, chlorophyll-a and ammonium concentration as gauges of resilience.We find that Daphnia magna increased our measures of resilience.But this effect is not consistent across ecosystem measures; in fact D. magna increased the difference between disturbed and undisturbed treatments in seston settlement loads.We have some evidence of shifting reproductive strategy in response to perturbation in D. magna and in the presence of Physa sp..These shifts correspond with altered population levels in D. magna , suggesting feedback loops between the herbivore species.While these results suggest only an ambiguous connection between functional traits to ecosystem resilience, they point to the difficulties in establishing such a link: indirect effects of one species on reproduction of another and different scales of response among components of the system, are just two examples that may compromise the power of simple predictions.

Resilience, the capacity for a system to bounce-back after a perturbation, is critical for conservation and restoration efforts. Different functional traits have differential effects on system-level resilience. We test this experimentally in a lab system consisting of algae consumed by zooplankton, snails, or both, using an eutrophication event as a perturbation. We examined seston settlement load, chlorophyll-a and ammonium concentration as gauges of resilience. We find that Daphnia magna increased our measures of resilience. But this effect is not consistent across ecosystem measures; in fact, D. magna increased the difference between disturbed and undisturbed treatments in seston settlement loads. We have some evidence of shifting reproductive strategy in response to perturbation in D. magna and in the presence of Physa sp. These shifts correspond with altered population levels in D. magna , suggesting feedback loops between the herbivore species. While these results suggest only an ambiguous connection between functional traits to ecosystem resilience, they point to the difficulties in establishing such a link: indirect effects of one species on reproduction of another and different scales of response among components of the system, are just two examples that may compromise the power of simple predictions.

The cockle Cerastoderma glaucum represents a significant element of the benthic community in Lake Qarun, Egypt. The population of this species has severely declined in the lake. For stock position assessment, cockles were collected in the winter of 2008 and 2018. The body size (length-frequency) distributions considerably varied among the collections. A single peak at 14 mm was present in 2008, and two peaks appeared ten years later (one at 13mm and another at 19 mm). The total weight, shell weight and flesh weight of individuals collected in 2008 exhibited isometric increase with shell length (SL). For samples collected in 2018, flesh weight increase was slower than shell length, indicating negative allometric growth. When 50% of the population achieved maturity (SM50), their sizes were 7.7 and 7.4 mm of SL for 2008 and 2018 collections, respectively, consistent with the sexual maturity being related to size rather than age. The overall sex ratios did not significantly differ from unity (1:1). The results of this study suggest that the species is sensitive to salinity changes and water pollution, with larger individuals being more resistant than the smaller ones. This may have implications for species’ long-term reproduction and density.

Asynchronous fluctuations of populations are essential for maintaining stable levels of bio-mass and ecosystem function in landscapes. Yet, understanding the stabilization of metacommunities by asynchrony is complicated by the existence of multiple forms of asynchrony that are typically studied independently: Community ecologists, for instance, focus on asynchrony within and among local communities, while population ecologists emphasize asynchrony of populations in metapopulations. Still, other forms of asynchrony, such as that which underlies the spatial insurance effect, are not captured by any existing analytical frameworks. We therefore developed a framework that would in one analysis unmask the stabilizing roles of local communities and metapopulations and so unify these perspectives. Our framework shows that metacommunity stabilization arises from one local and two regional forms of asynchrony: (1) asynchrony among species of a local community, (2) asynchrony among populations of a metapopulation, and (3) cross-community asynchrony, which is between different species in different local communities and underlies spatial insurance. For each type of stabilization, we derived links to diversity indices and associated diversity-stability relationships. We deployed this framework in a set of rock pool invertebrate metacommunities in Discovery Bay, Jamaica, to partition sources of stabilization and test their dependence on diversity. Cross-community asynchrony was the dominant form of stabilization, accounting for >60% of total metacommunity stabilization despite being undetectable with existing frameworks. Environmental variation influenced types of stabilization through different mechanisms. pH and dissolved oxygen, for example, increased asynchrony by decorrelating local species, while salinity did so by changing the abundance structure of metapopulations. Lastly, all types of asynchrony depended strongly on different types of diversity (alpha, metapopulation, and beta diversity drove local, metapopulation, and cross-community asynchrony, respectively) to produce multiple diversity-stability relationships within metacommunities. Our new partition of metacommunity dynamics highlights how different elements—from local communities to metapopulations—combine to stabilize metacommunities and depend critically on contrasting environmental regimes and diversities. Understanding and balancing these sources of stability in dynamic landscapes is a looming challenge for the future. We suggest that synthetic frameworks which merge ecological perspectives will be essential for grasping and safeguarding the stability of natural systems.

Long-term or cumulative diversity is the biodiversity that accumulates at a site over many generations of community members. Cumulative diversity is likely important to the intrinsic and functional value of ecosystems given the legacies left behind by many species. While its components—average short-term diversity (alpha) and temporal turnover (beta)—have been extensively studied, cumulative diversity itself has not. We therefore examined the environmental and community drivers of cumulative diversity with a novel hierarchical diversity partition. This partition breaks cumulative diversity into short-term, turnover, richness, and evenness components. We applied this framework to 49 tropical rock pool communities, censused over tens to hundreds of organism generations. Results uncovered two environmental regimes that differentially impacted the richness and evenness components of cumulative diversity: Occasional drying events mainly limited richness and reset communities, while less severe physicochemical variations reduced the evenness of communities. These causal pathways amount to differential controls on cumulative diversity; controls that can oppose each other to buffer diversity against change as well as create unexpected trade-offs for managers. We conclude that maintaining diversity at longer timescales requires new analytical tools and an expanded view that can account for its complexity.

In a world of increasing interconnections in global trade as well as rapid change in climate and land cover, the accelerating introduction and spread of invasive species is a critical concern due to associated negative social and ecological impacts, both real and perceived. Much of the societal response to invasive species to date has been associated with negative economic consequences of invasions. This response has shaped a war-like approach to addressing invasions, one with an agenda of eradications and intense ecological restoration efforts towards prior or more desirable ecological regimes. This trajectory often ignores the concept of ecological resilience and associated approaches of resilience-based governance. We argue that the relationship between ecological resilience and invasive species has been understudied to the detriment of attempts to govern invasions, and that most management actions fail, primarily because they do not incorporate adaptive, learning-based approaches. Invasive species can decrease resilience by reducing the biodiversity that underpins ecological functions and processes, making ecosystems more prone to regime shifts. However, invasions do not always result in a shift to an alternative regime; invasions can also increase resilience by introducing novelty, replacing lost ecological functions or adding redundancy that strengthens already existing structures and processes in an ecosystem. This paper examines the potential impacts of species invasions on the resilience of ecosystems and suggests that resilience-based approaches can inform policy by linking the governance of biological invasions to the negotiation of tradeoffs between ecosystem services.

Ecological resources and services (e.g. organisms, nutrient cycling) are distributed heterogeneously across landscapes. While spatial variation has been studied extensively, the pattern of hotspots and coolspots persisting over time – called persistent spatial variation (PSV) – has not. Yet this pattern imparts key information to managers about whether resources will be found consistently in certain locations or vary unpredictably. Anticipating whether an ecosystem variable will display PSV is thus a valuable prospect. We tested the ability of attributes of variables (e.g. niche breadth, abundance, temporal scale) to predict the occurrence of PSV. Using a new measure of PSV based on the F‐value of analysis of variance, we were able to 1) decompose the pattern of persistent hotspots into spatial and temporal components – ‘spatial variation’ of site mean values and ‘stability’ of time series at each site – and 2) identify predictors of these patterns in temperate lakes and tropical coastal rock pools. We found PSV to be highly predictable (R2 = up to 0.80) from an estimate of stability taken at a single site, as well as from other factors related to stability. These factors included whether the variable was environmental (stable, slow) or was an aggregate of other variables (stabilized by statistical averaging). Species properties like niche position and abundance were modest predictors because they correlated with PSV components of site occupancy, spatial variation and stability. We conclude that PSV and the distribution of resources in space and time might be predicted from simple temporal indicators (e.g. stability at a single location) when data are scarce.

Abstract Metacommunity perspective highlights the role of space as a factor contributing to local community structure and dynamics. Often tests of metacommunity models rely on snapshot patterns of species distribution and abundance. Such patterns may introduce biases because they overlook differences in responses of constituent species to changing environmental conditions, particularly when such responses override patterns predicted from dispersal and biotic interactions alone. This applies, for example, to habitat generalists, whose responses to environmental variations differ from those of habitat specialists, resulting in different snapshot patterns at different times. Synchronized (i.e., correlated among sites) environmental variation is perhaps the most obvious case of environmental variation that could generate regular differences among species of different specialization. We hypothesized that synchronized environmental variation synchronizes local populations of habitat specialists to a greater degree than it does for habitat generalists as experiments have shown that habitat generalists are less sensitive to changing environmental conditions. To test this in an empirical system, we used time series data (nine annual surveys) on an invertebrate metacommunity of 49 rock pools on the coast of Jamaica. We found that population synchrony of a significant portion of 24 species sharing these rock pools increased with habitat specialization in response to environmental synchrony (represented by synchrony of environment). However, distance among rock pools, which may affect dispersal or shared perturbations, was negatively correlated with population synchrony of individual species, irrespective of their specialization. As only habitat specialists showed increasing synchrony with environmental synchrony, and both generalist and specialist synchrony were negatively correlated with distance, we infer that habitat generalists must be synchronized more by space‐related processes while habitat specialists by a combination of environmental forcing and dispersal. Overall, the study suggests that species of different habitat specialization show consistent differences with respect to local processes involving environmental variations but show fewer differences with respect to regional processes involving distance, at least when long‐term dynamics are concerned. Furthermore, the study identifies a rarely recognized link between variation in space and its consequences for variation in time—a link much more expressed among spatially restricted species such as habitat specialists.

Ecological processes, like the rise and fall of populations, leave an imprint of their dynamics as a pattern in space. Mining this spatial record for insight into temporal change underlies many applications, including using spatial snapshots to infer trends in communities, rates of species spread across boundaries, likelihood of chaotic dynamics, and proximity to regime shifts. However, these approaches rely on an inherent but undefined link between spatial and temporal variation. We present a quantitative link between a variable’s spatial and temporal variation based on established variance-partitioning techniques, and test it for predictive and diagnostic applications. A strong link existed between spatial and regional temporal variation (estimated as Coefficients of Variation or CV’s) in 136 variables from three aquatic ecosystems. This association suggests a basis for substituting one for the other, either quantitatively or qualitatively, when long time series are lacking. We further show that weak substitution of temporal for spatial CV results from distortion by specific spatiotemporal patterns (e.g., inter-patch synchrony). Where spatial and temporal CV’s do not match, we pinpoint the spatiotemporal causes of deviation in the dynamics of variables and suggest ways that may control for them. In turn, we demonstrate the use of this framework for describing spatiotemporal patterns in multiple ecosystem variables and attributing them to types of mechanisms. Linking spatial and temporal variability makes quantitative the hitherto inexact practice of space-for-time substitution and may thus point to new opportunities for navigating the complex variation of ecosystems.