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Motivation The database initiated by the Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN) is one of the few globally implemented standardized vegetation surveys in mountains. The focus is on collecting plant species occurrences at 5‐year intervals along and adjacent to mountain roads spanning elevational gradients, with the goal of providing critical information about the ongoing spread of non‐native plants and the potential impacts...
Thermophilization: Concepts, Methods, and Implications of Changes in Community Composition due to Global WarmingNARA Subscribed
With global warming, many species will shift their geographic ranges coldward (i.e., towards higher latitudes and elevations) to remain within suitable thermal conditions. At the community level, these range shifts result in “thermophilization”—the increasing relative abundance of warm‐adapted (“thermophilic”) species and the concomitant decrease of cold‐adapted species over time. Quantifying rates of thermophilization provide...
Variation in the effectiveness of nonnative plant removal along elevation gradients in SwitzerlandNARA Subscribed
Limiting the spread and impact of nonnative species in mountain ecosystems is a key management objective. While current management strategies may be tailored to species traits and life histories, understanding how management effectiveness varies along elevation gradients could help optimize control measures and ultimately support native plant communities. We hypothesized that management efficiency would increase with elevation...
Aim Mountain roads host plant communities that differ strongly from the adjacent natural vegetation. Besides the effect of propagule pressure, altered disturbance and soil processes, one of the reasons given for the strong influence of mountain roads on species distributions is a significantly altered soil thermal microclimate in the roadside compared to the adjacent vegetation, as a direct consequence of road disturbance. How...
It is often assumed that group-living animals require larger brains in order to deal with the various social challenges they encounter. One such key challenge is the need to recognize and discriminate between specific group members. Individual recognition is often deemed the most cognitively demanding form of recognition. Hence, one could expect this ability to be facilitated by the evolution of larger brains. So far, this hyp...
Global Homogenisation of Plant Communities Along Mountain Roads by Non‐Native Species Despite Mixed Effects at Smaller ScalesNARA Subscribed
Aim Mountain ecosystems are experiencing increased invasion of non‐native plants. These increases in non‐native species put mountains at risk of biotic homogenisation and a reduction of biodiversity. Our study aims to test if non‐native plant species are contributing to biotic homogenisation along roadways in mountain regions and how this changes along elevation gradients and across spatial scales. Location 18 globally distrib...
Long‐term phenological data in alpine regions are often limited to a few locations and thus, little is known about climate‐change‐induced plant phenological shifts above the treeline. Because plant growth initiation in seasonally snow‐covered regions is largely driven by snowmelt timing and local temperature, it is essential to simultaneously track phenological shifts, snowmelt, and near‐ground temperatures. In this study, we...
Genomic Signatures of Adaptation Across a Precipitation Gradient From Niche Centre to Niche EdgeNARA Subscribed
Evaluating the potential for species to adapt to changing climates relies on understanding current patterns of adaptive variation and selection, which might vary in intensity across a species' niche, hence affecting our inference of where adaptation might be most important in the future. Here, we investigate the genetic basis of adaptation in Lactuca serriola along a steep precipitation gradient in Israel approaching the speci...
Functional Traits Predict Outcomes of Current and Novel Competition Under Warmer ClimateNARA Subscribed
Functional traits offer a potential avenue to generalize and forecast the impacts of changing competition on plant communities, including changing outcomes of competition among species that currently interact (current competition) or that will interact in the future following range shifts (novel competition). However, it remains unclear how well traits explain variation in the outcomes of current and novel competition as well...
Effects of climate change on plant-pollinator interactions and its multitrophic consequencesNARA Subscribed
There is wide consensus that climate change will seriously impact flowering plants and their pollinators. Shifts in flowering phenology and insect emergence as well as changes in the functional traits involved can cause alterations in plant-pollinator interactions, pollination success and plant reproductive output. Effects of rising temperatures, advanced snowmelt and altered precipitation patterns are expected to be particula...
Use of consumer insights to inform behavior change interventions aimed at illegal pet turtle trade in ChinaNARA Subscribed
Illegal poaching and overexploitation for the international pet trade are among the greatest threats to freshwater turtles in Southeast Asia. Expanding consumer research in China is crucial to filling knowledge gaps about the scale and structure of illegal trade and developing audience‐targeted and relevant interventions that may reduce demand for illegal turtles as pets. We applied mixed methods to provide a detailed understa...
Effecting change in ecologyNARA Subscribed
Positive and negative plant−plant interactions influence seedling establishment at both high and low elevationsNARA Subscribed
Deciphering how plants interact with each other across environmental gradients is important to understand plant community assembly, as well as potential future plant responses to environmental change. Plant − plant interactions are expected to shift from predominantly negative (i.e. competition) to predominantly positive (i.e. facilitation) along gradients of environmental severity. However, most experiments examine the net ef...
The Anthropocene is characterized by a rapid pace of environmental change and is causing a multitude of biotic responses, including those that affect the spatial distribution of species. Lagged responses are frequent and species distributions and assemblages are consequently pushed into a disequilibrium state. How the characteristics of environmental change—for example, gradual ‘press’ disturbances such as rising temperatures...
Microclimate—proximal climatic variation at scales of metres and minutes—can exacerbate or mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. However, most microclimate studies are temperature centric, and do not consider meteorological factors such as sunshine, hail and snow. Meanwhile, remote cameras have become a primary tool to monitor wild plants and animals, even at micro‐scales, and deep learning tools rapidly conv...
Mouse phenome database: curated data repository with interactive multi-population and multi-trait analysesNARA Subscribed
The Mouse Phenome Database continues to serve as a curated repository and analysis suite for measured attributes of members of diverse mouse populations. The repository includes annotation to community standard ontologies and guidelines, a database of allelic states for 657 mouse strains, a collection of protocols, and analysis tools for flexible, interactive, user directed analyses that increasingly integrates data across tra...
The Toxicology Investigators Consortium 2022 Annual ReportNARA Subscribed
Compensatory responses of vital rates attenuate impacts of competition on population growth and promote coexistenceNARA Subscribed
Competition is among the most important factors regulating plant population and community dynamics, but we know little about how different vital rates respond to competition and jointly determine population growth and species coexistence. We conducted a field experiment and parameterised integral projection models to model the population growth of 14 herbaceous plant species in the absence and presence of neighbours across an...
Ecological lags govern the pace and outcome of plant community responses to 21st‐century climate changeNARA Subscribed
Forecasting the trajectories of species assemblages in response to ongoing climate change requires quantifying the time lags in the demographic and ecological processes through which climate impacts species' abundances. Since experimental climate manipulations are typically abrupt, the observed species responses may not match their responses to gradual climate change. We addressed this problem by transplanting alpine grassland...
Global maps of soil temperatureNARA Subscribed
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1‐km 2 r...