Aim Intraspecific trait variability (ITV) is a key component of biodiversity because it informs how organisms respond to abiotic and biotic conditions. Understanding how the variability among individuals within a population (population‐level ITV) changes along environmental gradients offers insight into how local processes contribute to broad‐scale biodiversity patterns. Here, we examine how climate and species‐richness intera...

Cyanobacterial blooms can occur in freshwater ecosystems largely isolated from development and not experiencing extensive cultural eutrophication. For example, remote mountain lakes can experience intense blooms of diazotrophic (nitrogen‐fixing) cyanobacteria caused by factors acting at different spatial and temporal scales. In this study, we examined how cross‐scale interactions among watershed, lake, and food web characteris...

Mountain lakes, while seemingly pristine, have been subjected to historical fish stocking practices and exposure to atmospherically deposited contaminants like mercury. Mercury bioaccumulation in these ecosystems varies widely due to strong environmental gradients, and there are complex, hierarchical factors that affect mercury transport and loading, methylmercury production, and food web biomagnification. We sought to assess...

Human‐assisted introductions of exotic species are a leading cause of anthropogenic change in biodiversity; however, context dependencies and interactions with co‐occurring stressors impede our ability to predict their ecological impacts. The legacy of historical sportfish stocking in mountainous regions of western North America creates a unique, natural quasiexperiment to investigate factors moderating invasion impacts on nat...

Aim Despite a long‐standing research interest in the association between the biodiversity (i.e. taxonomic and functional composition) and trophic structure of communities, our understanding of the relationship remains limited. Community assembly theory predicts that niche partitioning will result in communities with a diverse array of functional traits, which in turn may facilitate a correspondingly diverse array of trophic in...

Aim Although it is recognized that ecological patterns are scale dependent, the exact scales over which specific ecological processes operate are still a matter of controversy. In particular, understanding the scales over which biotic interactions operate is critical for predicting changes in species distributions in the face of the ongoing biodiversity crisis. It has been hypothesized that biotic interactions operate predomin...

The relative importance of top‐down invader effects relative to environmental drivers was determined by sampling crustacean zooplankton, rotifer, and phytoplankton communities in a set of invaded and noninvaded reference lakes. The non‐native invertebrate predator Bythotrephes had significant effects on zooplankton community size structure, rotifers, and phytoplankton taxonomic composition, but no significant effects on crusta...

In the event of an environmental disturbance, dispersal of native taxa may provide species and genetic diversity to ecosystems, increasing the likelihood that there will be species and genotypes present that are less vulnerable to the disturbance. This may allow communities to maintain functioning during a disturbance and may be particularly important when the perturbation is novel to the system, such as the establishment of a...

The impacts of global warming on aquatic ecosystems are expected to be most pronounced at higher trophic levels in cold­water environments. Therefore, we hypothesized that warming of fishless alpine ponds would suppress large‐bodied consumers (e.g., cladocerans, copepods) and stimulate fast‐growing microorganisms (e.g., phytoflagellates, rotifers), thereby altering the community composition and total abundance of zooplankton a...