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| 2. |
- Hallett, Lauren M., et al.
(författare)
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Restoration ecology through the lens of
- 2023
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Ingår i: Trends in Ecology & Evolution. - : CELL PRESS. - 0169-5347 .- 1872-8383. ; 38:11, s. 1085-1096
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Advances in restoration ecology are needed to guide ecological restoration in a variable and changing world. Coexistence theory provides a framework for how variability in environmental conditions and species interactions affects species success. Here, we conceptually link coexistence theory and restoration ecology. First, including low-density growth rates (LDGRs), a classic metric of coexistence, can improve abundance-based restoration goals, because abundances are sensitive to initial treatments and ongoing variability. Second, growth-rate partitioning, developed to identify coexistence mechanisms, can improve restoration practice by informing site selection and indicating necessary interventions (e.g., site amelioration or competitor removal). Finally, coexistence methods can improve restoration assessment, because initial growth rates indicate trajectories, average growth rates measure success, and growth partitioning highlights interventions needed in future.
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| 3. |
- Aoyama, Lina, et al.
(författare)
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Application of modern coexistence theory to rare plant restoration provides early indication of restoration trajectories
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecological Applications. - : Wiley. - 1051-0761 .- 1939-5582. ; 32:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Restoration ecology commonly seeks to re-establish species of interest in degraded habitats. Despite a rich understanding of how succession influences re-establishment, there are several outstanding questions that remain unaddressed: are short-term abundances sufficient to determine long-term re-establishment success, and what factors contribute to unpredictable restorations outcomes? In other words, when restoration fails, is it because the restored habitat is substandard, because of strong competition with invasive species, or alternatively due to changing environmental conditions that would equally impact established populations? Here, we re-purpose tools developed from modern coexistence theory to address these questions, and apply them to an effort to restore the endangered Contra Costa goldfields (Lasthenia conjugens) in constructed ("restored") California vernal pools. Using 16 years of data, we construct a population model of L. conjugens, a species of conservation concern due primarily to habitat loss and invasion of exotic grasses. We show that initial, short-term appearances of restoration success from population abundances is misleading, as year-to-year fluctuations cause long-term population growth rates to fall below zero. The failure of constructed pools is driven by lower maximum growth rates compared with reference ("natural") pools, coupled with a stronger negative sensitivity to annual fluctuations in abiotic conditions that yield decreased maximum growth rates. Nonetheless, our modeling shows that fluctuations in competition (mainly with exotic grasses) benefit L. conjugens through periods of competitive release, especially in constructed pools of intermediate pool depth. We therefore show how reductions in invasives and seed addition in pools of particular depths could change the outcome of restoration for L. conjugens. By applying a largely theoretical framework to the urgent goal of ecological restoration, our study provides a blueprint for predicting restoration success, and identifies future actions to reverse species loss.
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| 4. |
- Weiss-Lehman, Christopher P., et al.
(författare)
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Disentangling key species interactions in diverse and heterogeneous communities : A Bayesian sparse modelling approach
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecology Letters. - : Wiley. - 1461-023X .- 1461-0248. ; 25:5, s. 1263-1276
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Modelling species interactions in diverse communities traditionally requires a prohibitively large number of species-interaction coefficients, especially when considering environmental dependence of parameters. We implemented Bayesian variable selection via sparsity-inducing priors on non-linear species abundance models to determine which species interactions should be retained and which can be represented as an average heterospecific interaction term, reducing the number of model parameters. We evaluated model performance using simulated communities, computing out-of-sample predictive accuracy and parameter recovery across different input sample sizes. We applied our method to a diverse empirical community, allowing us to disentangle the direct role of environmental gradients on species intrinsic growth rates from indirect effects via competitive interactions. We also identified a few neighbouring species from the diverse community that had non-generic interactions with our focal species. This sparse modelling approach facilitates exploration of species interactions in diverse communities while maintaining a manageable number of parameters.
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| 5. |
- Duarte, Ana, et al.
(författare)
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Evolutionary change in the construction of the nursery environment when parents are prevented from caring for their young directly
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424. ; 118:48
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Parental care can be partitioned into traits that involve direct engagement with offspring and traits that are expressed as an extended phenotype and influence the developmental environment, such as constructing a nursery. Here, we use experimental evolution to test whether parents can evolve modifications in nursery construction when they are experimentally prevented from supplying care directly to offspring. We exposed replicate experimental populations of burying beetles (Nicrophorus vespilloides) to different regimes of posthatching care by allowing larvae to develop in the presence (Full Care) or absence of parents (No Care). After only 13 generations of experimental evolution, we found an adaptive evolutionary increase in the pace at which parents in the No Care populations converted a dead body into a carrion nest for larvae. Cross-fostering experiments further revealed that No Care larvae performed better on a carrion nest prepared by No Care parents than did Full Care larvae. We conclude that parents construct the nursery environment in relation to their effectiveness at supplying care directly, after offspring are born. When direct care is prevented entirely, they evolve to make compensatory adjustments to the nursery in which their young will develop. The rapid evolutionary change observed in our experiments suggests there is considerable standing genetic variation for parental care traits in natural burying beetle populations-for reasons that remain unclear.
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| 6. |
- Dong, Min, et al.
(författare)
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The Structure and Classification of Botulinum Toxins
- 2021
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Ingår i: Botulinum Toxin Therapy. - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 0171-2004. - 9783030663056 ; 263, s. 11-33
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are a family of bacterial protein toxins produced by various Clostridium species. They are traditionally classified into seven major serotypes (BoNT/A-G). Recent progress in sequencing microbial genomes has led to an ever-growing number of subtypes, chimeric toxins, BoNT-like toxins, and remotely related BoNT homologs, constituting an expanding BoNT superfamily. Recent structural studies of BoNTs, BoNT progenitor toxin complexes, tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT), toxin-receptor complexes, and toxin-substrate complexes have provided mechanistic understandings of toxin functions and the molecular basis for their variations. The growing BoNT superfamily of toxins present a natural repertoire that can be explored to develop novel therapeutic toxins, and the structural understanding of their variations provides a knowledge basis for engineering toxins to improve therapeutic efficacy and expand their clinical applications.
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