Human activities are important drivers of marine ecosystem functioning. However, separating the synergistic effects of fishing and environmental variability on the prey base of nontarget predators is difficult, often because prey availability estimates on appropriate scales are lacking. Understanding how prey abundance at different spatial scales links to population change can help integrate the needs of nontarget predators in...

Relationships between abundance of post‐larval and juvenile carangid (jacks) fishes and physical oceanographic conditions were examined in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GoM) in 2011 with high freshwater input from the Mississippi River. Generalized additive models ( GAM s) were used to explore complex relationships between carangid abundance and physical oceanographic data of sea surface temperature ( SST ), sea surface height...

There is increasing recognition among conservation scientists that long‐term conservation outcomes could be improved through better integration of evolutionary theory into management practices. Despite concerns that the importance of key concepts emerging from evolutionary theory (i.e., evolutionary principles and processes) are not being recognized by managers, there has been little effort to determine the level of integratio...

A key debate in ecology centres on the relative importance of niche and neutral processes in determining patterns of community assembly with particular focus on whether ecologically similar species with similar functional traits are able to coexist. Meanwhile, molecular studies are increasingly revealing morphologically indistinguishable cryptic species with presumably similar ecological roles. Determining the geographic distr...