Jake M. Alexander results 36
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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...
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...
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...
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...
The scarcity of local plant extinctions following recent climate change has been explained by demographic inertia and lags in the displacement of resident species by novel species, generating an ‘extinction debt’. We established a transplant experiment to disentangle the contribution of these processes to the local extinction risk of four alpine plants in the Swiss Alps. Projected population growth (λ) derived from integral pr...
Macroecology in the age of Big Data – Where to go from here?NARA Subscribed
Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the amount of data available in all sciences and application domains. Macroecology is part of this “Big Data” trend, with a strong rise in the volume of data that we are using for our research. Here, we summarize the most recent developments in macroecology in the age of Big Data that were presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Specialist Group Macroecology of the Ecologic...
Scaling the linkage between environmental niches and functional traits for improved spatial predictions of biological communitiesNARA Subscribed
Issue Approaches to predicting species assemblages through stacking individual niche‐based species distribution models (S‐SDMs) need to account for community processes other than abiotic filtering. Such constraints have been introduced by implementing ecological assembly rules (EARs) into S‐SDMs, and can be based on patterns of functional traits in communities. Despite being logically valid, this approach has led to a limited...
Aim We investigated patterns of species richness and community dissimilarity along elevation gradients using globally replicated, standardized surveys of vascular plants. We asked how these patterns of diversity are influenced by anthropogenic pressures (road construction and non‐native species). Location Global. Time period 2008–2015. Major taxa studied Vascular plants. Methods Native and non‐native vascular plant species wer...
Rapid climatic changes and increasing human influence at high elevations around the world will have profound impacts on mountain biodiversity. However, forecasts from statistical models (e.g. species distribution models) rarely consider that plant community changes could substantially lag behind climatic changes, hindering our ability to make temporally realistic projections for the coming century. Indeed, the magnitudes of la...