Research news from the Ecological Society of America’s journals
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New research in Ecological Monographs uses 30 years of data on a South African population of meerkats to understand how these small mongooses cope with extreme conditions.
view moreCredit: Jack Thorley
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of five research articles recently published across its esteemed journals. Widely recognized for fostering innovation and advancing ecological knowledge, ESA’s journals consistently feature illuminating and impactful studies. This compilation of papers explores the challenges environmental changes pose to meerkats, a pathway to protected area management alongside Tribal Nations, the effects of marine heatwaves on marine fish, increased methane emissions in drylands, and the inadequacy of current frameworks for predicting animals’ adaptability to climate change.
From Ecological Monographs:
How meerkats take the heat (and drought)
Author contact: Jack Thorley (jbt27@cam.ac.uk)
Environmental changes in their Kalahari Desert homeland are putting meerkats to the ultimate test. In a setting where hot and dry conditions vary from season to season and year to year, literally making the difference between life and death, researchers have tracked a population of meerkats for nearly three decades to understand how these desert specialists handle environmental change. They found that wetter summer conditions led to a profusion of plants and insects; with so many more bugs, roots and tubers to gorge on, meerkat body size and overall condition improved. On the other hand, heat is a real challenge for these small mammals, and they struggled to find enough food when temperatures climbed above 37°C (98.6°F). Luckily for the meerkats, over the course of the study the hottest days tended to occur when the summer rains left the desert at its greenest peak, giving the meerkats an opportunity to recover as soon as temperatures dipped. Though safe for the moment, meerkats face significant challenges if expected shifts in climate patterns play out. A better understanding of the impacts that changes in rainfall and temperature will have is needed to ensure a future for this little African mongoose and other desert species.
Read the article: Linking climate variability to demography in cooperatively breeding meerkats
From Earth Stewardship:
A pathway to true co-management with Tribal Nations
Author contact: Lara A. Jacobs (LaraAJacobs@gmail.com)
Despite recent progress toward greater inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge, management of U.S. parks and protected areas remains firmly entrenched within Western views of conservation and land use. Building on a model based on studies of power dynamics, the authors of this study first identify the barriers that continue to impede incorporation of traditional knowledge in park management. From there, they construct a framework for shifting oversight of protected areas from conventional approaches to strategies that emerge from more equitable collaboration between Western and Native perspectives, with a gradual shift toward Indigenous-led administration. Rooting management of the nation’s public natural areas in Indigenous values, knowledge systems and leadership would both enhance conservation efforts and deepen recognition of Tribal Nations sovereignty and self-determination.
Read the article: U.S. parks and protected area power structures: From historic policies to Indigenous futurities
From Ecological Applications:
Failure to launch: Rockfish delay adulthood during marine heatwaves
Author contact: R. Claire Rosemond (claire.rosemond@noaa.gov)
Marine fish will grow at a faster rate and mature earlier as ocean temperatures warm — or so goes the prevailing theory. But the results of a recent survey of black rockfish in the coastal waters of the U.S. Pacific Northwest may upend this tidy premise. Measurements of young female rockfish caught during strong marine heatwaves — periods when expanses of ocean water are considerably hotter than normal — revealed that juveniles did indeed grow faster, as was predicted. Contrary to expectations, however, females took longer to mature during heatwaves than under cooler conditions. This delayed onset of adulthood suggests that current frameworks fail to capture the full complexity of the relationship between water temperature and fish development, muddling efforts to predict how fish will respond to the warmer oceans and more frequent marine heatwaves looming on the horizon.
Read the article: Elevated fish growth yet postponed maturation during intense marine heatwaves
From Ecosphere:
Wetting of drylands increases methane emissions
Author contact: Uthara Vengrai (uthara.vengrai@yale.edu)
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and scientists have long assumed that dryland ecosystems like deserts and arid grasslands and shrublands soak up more methane than they emit. But new research shows that the introduction of irrigation and artificial wetlands for agriculture is altering this equation. Though covering a mere 1% of the landscape, constructed wetlands in Wyoming were found to release more methane into the atmosphere than is removed by surrounding ecosystems (primarily sagebrush), due to changes in soil characteristics, soil microbial communities and a host of other factors. This large effect of irrigation on methane absorption and release can effectively transform dryland ecosystems into net producers of methane, with considerable implications for future warming and subsequent climate change.
Read the article: Land use change converts temperate dryland landscape into a net methane source
From Ecology:
Animal heat–cold tolerance depends on scale
Author contact: Miguel Tejedo (tejedo@ebd.csic.es)
New evidence suggests that how animals cope with extreme heat and cold depends on the scale of study. Using data extracted from other studies on hundreds of species, the researchers found that across large geographic expanses, the heat tolerance of many amphibians, insects and reptiles remained constant, while their cold tolerance varied much more from place to place — a pattern consistent with the results of previous research. Yet at smaller scales that better reflect where these animals live (an outcrop of rocks, say, or a stand of trees), the opposite was observed, with heat tolerance fluctuating more than the animals’ abilities to cope with cold. This reversal at local levels is cause for hope, as even a little bit of additional thermal headroom could increase a species’ chance for survival in a rapidly warming world. Moreover, the findings serve as a warning that overreliance on global and regional patterns while ignoring the role of local-scale patterns may lead us to underestimate an animal’s true resilience to changing environmental conditions.
Read the article: High thermal variation in maximum temperatures invert Brett’s heat-invariant rule at fine spatial scales
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The Ecological Society of America, founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 8,000 member Society publishes six journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach and education initiatives. The Society’s Annual Meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website at https://www.esa.org
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