Maria Connolly results 18
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Global projections of ecosystem responses to increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures are needed to inform adaptation planning. However, data of appropriate spatiotemporal resolution are often not available to parameterize complex environmental processes at the global scale. Modeling approaches that can project the probability of ecosystem persistence when parameter uncertainty is high may offer a way forward. In partic...
Six years of demography data for 11 reef coral speciesNARA Subscribed
Scleractinian corals are colonial animals with a range of life‐history strategies, making up diverse species assemblages that define coral reefs. We tagged and tracked ~30 colonies from each of 11 species during seven trips spanning 6 years (2009–2015) to measure their vital rates and competitive interactions on the reef crest at Trimodal Reef, Lizard Island, Australia. Pairs of species were chosen from five growth forms in wh...
Net effects of life‐history traits explain persistent differences in abundance among similar speciesNARA Subscribed
Life‐history traits are promising tools to predict species commonness and rarity because they influence a population's fitness in a given environment. Yet, species with similar traits can have vastly different abundances, challenging the prospect of robust trait‐based predictions. Using long‐term demographic monitoring, we show that coral populations with similar morphological and life‐history traits show persistent (decade‐lo...
Common, low-frequency, rare, and ultra-rare coding variants contribute to COVID-19 severityNARA Subscribed
The combined impact of common and rare exonic variants in COVID-19 host genetics is currently insufficiently understood. Here, common and rare variants from whole-exome sequencing data of about 4000 SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals were used to define an interpretable machine-learning model for predicting COVID-19 severity. First, variants were converted into separate sets of Boolean features, depending on the absence or the pr...
Future carbon emissions from global mangrove forest lossNARA Subscribed
Mangroves have among the highest carbon densities of any tropical forest. These ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems can store large amounts of carbon for long periods, and their protection reduces greenhouse gas emissions and supports climate change mitigation. Incorporating mangroves into Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement and their valuation on carbon markets requires predicting how the management of different l...
The molecular biogeography of the Indo‐Pacific: Testing hypotheses with multispecies genetic patternsNARA Subscribed
Aim To test hypothesized biogeographic partitions of the tropical Indo‐Pacific Ocean with phylogeographic data from 56 taxa, and to evaluate the strength and nature of barriers emerging from this test. Location The Indo‐Pacific Ocean. Time period Pliocene through the Holocene. Major taxa studied Fifty‐six marine species. Methods We tested eight biogeographic hypotheses for partitioning of the Indo‐Pacific using a novel modific...
The assessment of fishery status depends on fish habitatsNARA Subscribed
At the crux of the debate over the global sustainability of fisheries is what society must do to prevent over‐exploitation and aid recovery of fisheries that have historically been over‐exploited. The focus of debates has been on controlling fishing pressure, and assessments have not considered that stock production may be affected by changes in fish habitat. Fish habitats are being modified by climate change, built infrastruc...
Negligible effect of competition on coral colony growthNARA Subscribed
Competition is an important determinant of assemblage structure and population regulation, often resulting in decreased growth, fecundity or survival. In corals, most studies testing for an effect of competition on demographic traits, such as growth, have been experimental and often impose very high levels of competition upon colonies. To more realistically assess the role of competition on coral traits, multispecies studies i...
Prevalence of multimodal species abundance distributions is linked to spatial and taxonomic breadthNARA Subscribed
Aim Species abundance distributions (SADs) are a synthetic measure of biodiversity and community structure. Although typically described by unimodal logseries or lognormal distributions, empirical SADs can also exhibit multiple modes. However, we do not know how prevalent multimodality is, nor do we have an understanding of the factors leading to this pattern. Here we quantify the prevalence of multimodality in SADs across a w...
Understanding species differences in demographic strategies is a fundamental goal of ecology. In scleractinian corals, colony morphology is tightly linked with many demographic traits, such as size‐specific growth and morality. Here we test how well morphology predicts the colony size‐fecundity relationship in eight species of broadcast‐spawning corals. Variation in colony fecundity is greater among morphologies than between s...
Nitrogen yield advantage from grass–legume mixtures is robust over a wide range of legume proportions and environmental conditionsNARA Subscribed
Current challenges to global food security require sustainable intensification of agriculture through initiatives that include more efficient use of nitrogen (N), increased protein self‐sufficiency through homegrown crops, and reduced N losses to the environment. Such challenges were addressed in a continental‐scale field experiment conducted over 3 years, in which the amount of total nitrogen yield (N tot ) and the gain of N...
Understanding life history and demographic variation among species within communities is a central ecological goal. Mortality schedules are especially important in ecosystems where disturbance plays a major role in structuring communities, such as coral reefs. Here, we test whether a trait‐based, mechanistic model of mechanical vulnerability in corals can explain mortality schedules. Specifically, we ask whether species that b...
Testing species abundance models: a new bootstrap approach applied to Indo‐Pacific coral reefsNARA Subscribed
Patterns in the commonness and rarity of species are a fundamental characteristic of ecological assemblages; however, testing between alternative models for such patterns remains an important challenge. Conventional approaches to fitting or testing species abundance models often assume that species, not individuals, are the units that are sampled and that species' abundances are independent of one another. Here we test three d...
Multiple modes in a coral species abundance distributionNARA Subscribed
Species abundance distributions are an important measure of biodiversity and community structure. These distributions are affected by sampling, and alternative species‐abundance models often make similar predictions for small sample sizes. Very large samples reveal the relative abundances of rare species, and thus provide information about species relative abundances that small samples cannot. Here, we present the species‐abun...
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