Socially transmitted information can significantly affect the ways in which animals interact with their environments. We used network-based diffusion analysis, a novel and powerful tool for exploring information transmission, to model the rate at which sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) discovered prey patches, comparing shoals foraging in open and structured environments. We found that for ...

Climate change is increasing the risk of drought to forested ecosystems. Although drought impacts are often anecdotally noted to occur in discrete patches of high canopy mortality, the landscape effects of drought disturbances have received virtually no study. This study characterized the landscape configuration of drought impact patches and investigated the relationships between patch characte...

Tropical agro-forest landscapes are global priority areas for biodiversity conservation. Little is known about the ability of these landscapes to sustain large late successional forest trees upon which much forest biodiversity depends. These landscapes are subject to fragmentation and additional habitat degradation which may limit tree recruitment and thus compromise numerous ecosystem services...

Spatial patterns of genetic variation provide information central to many ecological, evolutionary, and conservation questions. This spatial variability has traditionally been analyzed through summary statistics between pairs of populations, therefore missing the simultaneous influence of all populations. More recently, a network approach has been advocated to overcome these limitations. This n...

Cryptically colored prey species are often polymorphic, occurring in multiple distinctive pattern variants. Visual predators promote such phenotypic variation through apostatic selection, in which they attack more abundant prey types disproportionately often. In heterogeneous environments, disruptive selection to match the coloration of disparate habitat patches could also produce polymorphism,...

In many ecological situations, resources are difficult to find but become more apparent to nearby searchers after one of their numbers discovers and begins to exploit them. If the discoverer cannot monopolize the resources, then others may benefit from joining the discoverer and sharing their discovery. Existing theories for this type of conspecific attraction have often used very simple rules ...

Semantic fluency tasks have increasingly been used to probe the structure of human memory, adopting methodologies from the ecological foraging literature to describe memory as a trajectory through semantic space. Clusters of semantically related items are often produced together, and the transitions between these clusters of semantically related items are consistent with theories of optimal for...

Ecological stoichiometry studies the balance of energy and multiple chemical elements in ecological interactions to establish how the laws of thermodynamics affect food-web dynamics and nutrient cycling in ecosystems. In this paper, we incorporate stoichiometric principles in a model with habitat heterogeneity and dispersal in order to better understand population growth dynamics. This model de...

Cities are rapidly growing throughout the world and are altering biologic processes in many regions, with global consequences. Urbanization in the Phoenix, USA metropolitan region has dramatically altered regional ecosystem patterns, but little is known about how these changes have influenced soil organic matter, total nitrogen, and the distribution of nitrogen stable isotopes. Because urban de...

Earthworm assemblages are usually spatio-temporally structured in mosaics of patches with different species composition. We re-analysed results of past research carried out in Eastern Colombia to explore how interspecific competition accounts for this pattern. In three sown pastures and three native savannas, density data matrices were obtained from spatially explicit samplings at several succe...