Trait‐based approaches can improve ecological understanding by linking fitness to the environment. The trilateral life history model is an expansion of r‐ and K‐selection theory that reflects trade‐offs between juvenile survival, fecundity, and generation time and describes differential survival of species across environmental gradients. We used this framework to generate and test hypotheses regarding community assembly and th...

Freshwater bivalves are globally distributed, diverse, and common in benthic communities. Many taxa, particularly in the most species‐rich order, Unionida, are declining due to anthropogenic stressors, while a small number of non‐native species have become increasingly abundant and widespread, commonly replacing native bivalve assemblages. To understand how these global changes may impact ecosystems and people, we conducted a...

We identified 14 emerging and poorly understood threats and opportunities for addressing the global conservation of freshwater mussels over the next decade. A panel of 17 researchers and stakeholders from six continents submitted a total of 56 topics that were ranked and prioritized using a consensus‐building Delphi technique. Our 14 priority topics fell into five broad themes (autecology, population dynamics, global stressors...

The roles mobile animals and abiotic processes play as vectors for resource transfers between ecosystems (“subsidies”) are well studied, but the idea that resources from animals with limited mobility may be transported across boundaries through intermediate taxa remains unexplored. Aquatic plants (“macrophytes”) are globally distributed and may mediate transfers of aquatic‐derived nutrients from aggregations of aquatic animals...

The concept of shifting baselines in conservation science implies advocacy for the use of historical knowledge to inform these baselines but does not address the feasibility of restoring sites to those baselines. In many regions, conservation feasibility varies among sites due to differences in resource availability, statutory power, and land‐owner participation. We used zooarchaeological records to identify a historical basel...

Nutrient cycling is a key process linking organisms in ecosystems. This is especially apparent in stream environments in which nutrients are taken up readily and cycled through the system in a downstream trajectory. Ecological stoichiometry predicts that biogeochemical cycles of different elements are interdependent because the organisms that drive these cycles require fixed ratios of nutrients. There is growing recognition th...

Although biodiversity can increase ecosystem productivity and adjacent ecosystems are often linked by resource flows between them, the relationship between biodiversity and resource subsidies is not well understood. Here we test the influence of biodiversity on resource subsidy flux by manipulating freshwater mussel species richness and documenting the effects on a trophic cascade from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems. In a m...

To increase the generality of biodiversity–ecosystem function theory, studies must be expanded to include real communities in a variety of systems. We modified J. W. Fox's approach to partition the influence of species richness on standing crop biomass (net biodiversity effect) of 21 freshwater mussel communities into trait‐independent complementarity, trait‐dependent complementarity (species with particular traits dominate wi...