Ecology Letters最新文献

Crop diversification is a promising strategy to strengthen pest control services in agricultural landscapes. Diversifying crops may limit pests through host crop dilution or by enhancing top-down control by their enemies. However, crop diversification may also benefit generalist pests through higher resource continuity. Using a large-scale dataset encompassing 742 landscapes across 13 countries, we assessed the impact of landscape-scale crop diversity on the abundance of natural enemies, the potential for biological control, and insect pest abundance. Crop diversification did not increase the overall abundance of natural enemies or the potential for biological pest control. Instead, crop diversity primarily favoured the abundance of specialist natural enemies and pests in highly simplified landscapes, an effect that was reduced in landscapes with high proportions of semi-natural habitats. Lastly, low proportions of host crops in the landscape were associated with higher abundances of natural enemies. Taken together, our results indicate that crop diversification is not a 'one size fits all' strategy to control agricultural pests, and that other landscape characteristics, such as high amounts of semi-natural habitats, must be considered to enhance biological pest control services.

Flowering time underpins plant fitness, species coexistence, and ecosystem functioning. While global warming consistently advances flowering, the influence of water availability remains unclear. We hypothesized that this inconsistency reflects the overlooked timing of drought. In 200 experimental Mediterranean annual-plant communities, we imposed autumn, winter, and spring dry periods and grew plants in monocultures and mixtures to disentangle physiological and competition-mediated responses. Dry autumn and spring shortened flowering duration: dry autumn delayed onset, dry spring advanced termination. Some shifts were direct; others emerged through competition. A new community-level index revealed greater phenological segregation in mixtures, showing that plasticity alone can generate niche separation under competition. Both dry autumn and spring tended to further enhance this segregation. Together, our results demonstrate that the seasonal timing of drought governs flowering responses through both direct physiological pathways and indirect biotic interactions, emphasizing rainfall seasonality as a key driver of ecological responses to climate change.

We had planned to publish two Viewpoints on biological sex in the same issue of the journal. In retrospect, this was not a good idea because it failed to account for how long manuscripts can take to move through peer review. When I was assigned Eppley et al.'s manuscript, I felt it merited review but knew its publication in Ecology Letters would be controversial. When the reviews arrived, one by Tim Janicke made a particularly compelling case for the prevailing (though increasingly contested) view that biological sex is binary. We therefore invited Dr. Janicke to write a Viewpoint on the subject, invited Dr. Eppley and other experts to review it, and intended to hold both manuscripts until they had completed peer review.

Unfortunately, this plan conflicted with the journal's normal workflow of publishing accepted manuscripts as soon as possible. Although an exception was supposed to be made in this case, it was not, and Eppley et al.'s manuscript appeared before Janicke et al. had finished writing theirs.

Now that both Viewpoints are published, I encourage interested readers to read them back-to-back. What distinguishes these articles from many recent contributions on biological sex is that each manuscript was reviewed by authors of the other manuscript, as well as by two additional experts. This unusual arrangement helped resolve some initial disagreements—especially semantic ones—and sharpened the authors' arguments. The authors were under no obligation to follow reviewer suggestions, but they were required to respond to every point. One risk of such a process is that the final products become heavily qualified or diluted versions of the authors' views, but I do not think that happened here.

Janicke et al.'s Viewpoint is not a point-by-point rebuttal of Eppley et al.'s, nor do the two articles present diametrically opposed positions. Rather, each stands on its own while engaging a common question from a different perspective. For me, reading these articles was a reminder that biology is messy: almost anything that could evolve has evolved at least once. Even if we leave humans completely out of the discussion, biological sex remains a fascinating and complex subject.

This article is linked to Eppley et al. and Janicke et al. papers. To view these articles, visit https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70350 and https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70426.

The definition of biological sex has become a renewed focus of societal debate, fuelled by the conflation of biological principles with discussions of human gender diversity. Here, we argue that conceptual clarity critically depends on separating these domains. Drawing on evolutionary theory and empirical evidence, we maintain that biological sex is best defined as a binary classification of male and female reproductive strategies rooted in anisogamy, characterised by the production of two discrete gamete types of different sizes. We stress that gamete size constitutes the ultimate criterion for biological sex and that this definition applies consistently across sexual systems, from separate-sexed species to hermaphrodites, irrespective of variation in karyotype, hormonal profile, somatic phenotype, or behaviour. Further, we emphasise that evolutionary insights offer a coherent explanation for recurring, though not universal, associations between biological sex and patterns of sex-specific selection, sexual dimorphism and parental care. We conclude that the definition of biological sex as a binary classification based on gamete size is a powerful scientific framework compatible with the diversity of sexual phenotypes found in anisogamous organisms and distinct from the concept of human gender.

Habitat selection analyses, which discern the environmental conditions individuals select, often inform conservation planning. Through a literature review, we demonstrate that recent habitat selection studies rarely include fitness and health information. With a simulation study, we show that ignoring such information could support the protection of sink habitats. Our case studies demonstrate how health and fitness proxies can modify our understanding of habitat selection: (1) incorporating mass gain of thick-billed murres shows the energetic benefit of areas deemed secondary by a naive resource selection function; (2) including number of chicks in a step selection function (SSF) exposes the complex relationships glaucous-winged gulls have with landscapes impacted by humans; and (3) including external signs of trauma in the movement kernel of SSFs demonstrates other ways in which narwhal distribution can be altered. We urge movement ecologists to collect and use health and fitness data to improve ecological inference and conservation action.

Rethinking the ecological significance of network topology in the area of environmental DNA (eDNA) data represents a major challenge in ecology, as network structure fundamentally influences ecosystem functioning. However, translating network analysis into tools for ecological assessment is still in its infancy. Here, we present an innovative approach integrating eDNA inventories with graph theory (specifically graphlet analysis), niche modelling, and machine learning to build a predictive model for ecological assessment. We validated our approach using 599 phytoplankton inventories collected from 186 lakes spanning a gradient of human-induced eutrophication. We demonstrated the effectiveness of graphlet-based network topological metrics for ecological assessment (explaining 67% of the anthropogenic gradient variability), as well as their link with ecological processes. This framework offers a scalable and transposable approach to a wide range of ecological situations to obtain assessment tools grounded on graphlet-based network topology, paving the way for a more comprehensive understanding of ecosystem functioning.

Sayuri, D.-P., C.-L. Pablo, D. Davide, C. Mariusz, and S. Joanna. 2026. “ Artificial Light at Night Consistently Impacts Avian Physiology and Behaviour: A Meta-Analysis.” Ecology Letters 29, no. 4: e70382. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70382.

In the published version of the article, the authors’ names are incorrectly presented in a first name–last name format.

The authors’ names should appear in a last name–first name format as follows:

Sayuri Díaz-Palma; Pablo Capilla-Lasheras; Davide Dominoni; Mariusz Cichoń; and Joanna Sudyka.

Accordingly, the correct citation is:

Díaz-Palma, S., P. Capilla-Lasheras, D. Dominoni, M. Cichoń, and J. Sudyka. 2026. “Artificial Light at Night Consistently Impacts Avian Physiology and Behaviour: A Meta-Analysis.” Ecology Letters 29 (4): e70382.

We apologise for this error.

We utilized a long-term study of Weddell seals to compute lifetime reproductive success (LRS) distributions using a theoretical approach and an empirical approach. These comparisons are often difficult to achieve among natural populations but are important for disentangling sources of variation in lifetime measures. We performed three independent analyses: the first compared LRS and age-at-death distributions among populations living under different environmental conditions, the second focused on populations differing in individual heterogeneity (i.e., high or low reproductive strategy), and the third compared a theoretical LRS distribution with an empirical LRS distribution. Iceberg conditions increased the probability of LRS = 0 while individual heterogeneity had little influence on LRS distributions. Age-at-death distributions were also highly skewed and only early life mortality was affected by environmental condition. Our theoretical LRS distribution was strikingly similar to the empirical distribution estimated from females experiencing natural intrinsic trait variability and extrinsic environmental variability. We also examine inequality measures which show that females must be ‘lucky’ to survive past maturity and of those who do, only 74% breed. These findings contribute to ongoing research that reveals how diversity in lifetime outcomes is largely governed by chance alone.