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Spatio-temporal distribution patterns of species in response to natural and anthropogenic drivers provide insight into the ecological processes that determine community composition. We investigated determinant...
Plant survival is a key factor in forest dynamics and survival probabilities often vary across life stages. Studies specifically aimed at assessing tree survival are unusual and so data initially designed for ...
Niche theory predicts that human disturbance should influence the assembly of communities, favouring functionally homogeneous communities dominated by few but widespread generalists. The decline and loss of sp...
Nematodes are extremely diverse and numbers of species are predicted to be more than a million. Studies on nematode diversity are difficult and laborious using classical methods and therefore high-throughput s...
Studies on the diversity of yeasts in floral nectar were first carried out in the late 19th century. A narrow group of fermenting, osmophilous ascomycetes were regarded as exclusive specialists able to populate t...
There are a variety of ways of increasing crop diversity to increase agricultural sustainability and in turn having a positive influence on nearby natural ecosystems. Competitive crops may provide potent manag...
The proto-periodical cicada Okanagana rimosa is subject to infection by the acoustically orientating parasitoid fly Emblemasoma auditrix. Furthermore, it is also the only known host of E. auditrix. Here we test t...
Studying the drivers and determinants of species, population and community spatial patterns is central to ecology. The observed structure of community assemblages is the result of deterministic abiotic (enviro...
Most vertebrates experience coinfections, and many pathogen-pathogen interactions occur indirectly through the host immune system. These interactions are particularly strong in mixed micro-macroparasite infect...
Species coexistence in mosquito assemblages may depend on mechanisms related to interspecific resource partitioning occurring at multiple scales. In the present work we investigated co-occurrence or spatial se...
Nutrient deficiency affects the growth and population dynamics of consumers. Endoparasites can be seen as consumers that drain carbon (C) or energy from their host while simultaneously competing for limiting r...
A remarkable range of environmental conditions is present in the Hawaiian Islands due to their gradients of elevation, rainfall and island age. Despite being well known as a location for the study of evolution...
Interactions between aboveground and belowground terrestrial communities are often mediated by plants, with soil organisms interacting via the roots and aboveground organisms via the shoots and leaves. Many st...
BMC Ecology showcases the winning entries from its second Ecology Image Competition. More than 300 individual images were submitted from an international array of research scientists, depicting life on every cont...
Nearly 40 years ago, Freeland and Janzen predicted that liver biotransformation enzymes dictated diet selection by herbivores. Despite decades of research on model species and humans, little is known about the...
Geographic ranges of ectotherms such as reptiles may be determined strongly by abiotic factors owing to causal links between ambient temperature, juvenile survival and individual sex (male or female). Unfortun...
Small, genetically uniform populations may face an elevated risk of extinction due to reduced environmental adaptability and individual fitness. Fragmentation can intensify these genetic adversities and, there...
Molecular studies in social mammals rarely compare the inferences gained from genetic analyses with field information, especially in the context of dispersal. In this study, we used genetic data to elucidate s...
Gene flow and adaptive divergence are key aspects of metapopulation dynamics and ecological speciation. Long-distance dispersal is hard to detect and few studies estimate dispersal in combination with adaptive...
The guppy (Poecilia reticulata) is a successful invasive species. It is also a species that mates multiply; previous studies have demonstrated that this strategy carries fitness benefits. Guppies are routinely in...
Emerging evidence suggests that ecological heterogeneity across space can influence the genetic structure of populations, including that of long-distance dispersers such as large carnivores. On the central coa...
Cyclic rodent population dynamics are subjected to both intrinsic regulatory processes such as density-dependence and extrinsic environmental forcing. Among extrinsic factors, seasonal environmental variation ...
The metabolic strategies employed by microbes inhabiting natural systems are, in large part, dictated by the physical and geochemical properties of the environment. This study sheds light onto the complex rela...
Although semelparity is a life history characterized by a single reproductive episode within a single reproductive season, some semelparous organisms facultatively express a second bout of reproduction, either...
There are two predominant hypotheses as to why animals ingest plastic: 1) they are opportunistic feeders, eating plastic when they encounter it, and 2) they eat plastic because it resembles prey items. To asse...
In many bird species colour traits influence social dominance and breeding success. In our study we first evaluated whether the colour of the basic plumage (tail feathers grown at the end of the breeding seaso...
Bromelia pinguin (Bromeliaceae) is a terrestrial bromeliad commonly found under forest stands throughout the Neotropics that has been shown to have antifungal activity in vitro. We have hypothesized that this bro...
As part of BioMed Central’s open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology o...
The timing of migration substantially influences individual fitness. To match peak requirements with peak resource availability, we hypothesized that individual migrants schedule spring migration in close rela...
Specialized interactions help structure communities, but persistence of specialized organisms is puzzling because a generalist can occupy more environments and partake in more beneficial interactions. The “Jac...
Windthrow, the uprooting of trees during storms associated with strong winds, is a well-established cause of mortality in temperate regions of the world, often with large ecological consequences. However, this...
The editors of BMC Ecology would like to thank all of our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in volume 13 (2013).
Movements of animals have important consequences, at both the individual and population levels. Due to its important implications in the evolutionary dynamics of populations, dispersal is one of the most studi...
Non-essential facultative endosymbionts can provide their hosts with protection from parasites, pathogens, and predators. For example, two facultative bacterial symbionts of the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum), S...
Although the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a major model organism in diverse biological areas and well studied under laboratory conditions, little is known about its ecology. Therefore, characterization of t...
Development rates of Aedes aegypti are known to vary with respect to many abiotic and biotic factors including temperature, resource availability, and intraspecific competition. The relative importance of these f...
Plant biodiversity can affect trophic interactions in many ways, including direct bottom-up effects on insects, but is negatively affected by agricultural intensification. Grassland intensification promotes pl...
Flexible foraging strategies, such as prey switching, omnivory and food mixing, are key to surviving in a labile and changing environment. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in western Hudson Bay are versatile predato...
One of the main challenges in evolutionary parasitology is to determine the factors that explain variation among host species in parasitism. In this study, we addressed whether host phylogeny or ecology was im...
Animals show consistent individual behavioural patterns over time and over situations. This phenomenon has been referred to as animal personality or behavioural syndromes. Little is known about consistency of ...
Introduced earthworms are widespread in forests of North America creating significant negative impacts on forest understory communities. However, much of the reported evidence for negative earthworm effects co...
In anurans, differences in male mating calls have intensively been studied with respect to taxonomic classification, phylogeographic comparisons among different populations and sexual selection. Although overa...
Change in land use and management can impact massively on soil ecosystems. Ecosystem engineers and other functional biodiversity in soils can be influenced directly by such change and this in turn can affect k...
Sampling design is a key issue when establishing species inventories and characterizing habitats within highly heterogeneous landscapes. Sampling efforts in such environments may be constrained and many field ...
Arctic ecosystems, especially those near transition zones, are expected to be strongly impacted by climate change. Because it is positioned on the ecotone between tundra and boreal forest, the Churchill area i...
Short lived, iteroparous animals in seasonal environments experience variable social and environmental conditions over their lifetime. Animals can be divided into those with a “young-of-the-year” life history ...
Dispersal comprises three broad stages - departure from the natal or breeding locations, subsequent travel, and settlement. These stages are difficult to measure, and vary considerably between sexes, age class...
Interactions between hosts and parasites can be substantially modulated by host nutrition. Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are essential dietary nutrients; they are indispensable as structural components o...
Coleoptera is the most diverse order of insects (>300,000 described species), but its richness diminishes at increasing latitudes (e.g., ca. 7400 species recorded in Canada), particularly of phytophagous and d...
