Abstract Groundwater residence time distributions provide fundamental insights on the hydrological processes within watersheds. Yet, observations that can constrain groundwater residence times over broad timescales remain scarce in mountain catchment studies. We use environmental tracers (CFC‐12, SF

Gut microbes are believed to play a critical role in most animal life, yet fitness effects and cost-benefit trade-offs incurred by the host are poorly understood. Unlike most hosts studied to date, butterflies largely acquire their nutrients from larval feeding, leaving relatively little opportunity

Ants are ecologically dominant members of terrestrial communities. Ant foraging is often strongly associated with plants and depends upon associative learning of chemicals in the environment. As a result, plant chemicals can affect ant behaviors and, in so doing, have strong multi-trophic indirect e

Summary Vegetative traits of plants can respond directly to changes in the environment, such as those occurring under climate change. That phenotypic plasticity could be adaptive, maladaptive, or neutral. We manipulated the timing of spring snowmelt and amount of summer precipitation in factorial co

Individual differences in fecundity often serve as proxies for differences in overall fitness, especially when it is difficult to track the fate of an individual's offspring to reproductive maturity. Using fecundity may be biased, however, if density-dependent interactions between siblings affect su

Natural hybridization can produce individuals that vary widely in fitness, depending upon the performance of particular genotypes in a given environment. In a hybrid zone with habitat heterogeneity, differences in physiological responses to abiotic conditions could influence the fitness and spatial

Abstract Soil microorganisms are known to survive periods of aridity and to recover rapidly after wetting events, with the ability to transition between a dormant state in dry conditions and an active state in wet conditions. Though this dynamic behavior has been previously incorporated into soil ca

Environmental factors influence variation in life histories by affecting growth, development, and reproduction. We conducted an experiment in outdoor mesocosms to examine how diet and a time constraint on juvenile development (pond-drying) influence life-history trade-offs (growth, development, adul

AbstractMany mutualisms are taken advantage of by organisms that take rewards from their partners but provide no benefit in return. In the absence of traits that limit exploitation, facultative exploiters (partners that can either exploit or cooperate) are widely predicted by mutualism theory to cho

Documenting and predicting patterns of vegetation change over time are challenging due to a lack of sufficiently detailed historical data for comparison. Montane plant communities are expected to respond to anthropogenic disturbance, including climate change, in complex ways dependent on component s

Although species interactions are often proposed to be stronger at lower latitudes and elevations, few studies have evaluated the mechanisms driving such patterns. In this study, we assessed whether, and by which mechanisms, abiotic changes associated with elevation altered the outcome of an ant–aph

Flight is a central determinant of fitness in butterflies and other insects, but it is restricted to a limited range of body temperatures. To achieve these body temperatures, butterflies use a combination of morphological, behavioural and physiological mechanisms. Here, we used common garden (withou

John Harte,1* Andrew Rominger2 We extend macroecological theory based on the maximum entropy principle from species level to and Wenyu Zhang3 higher taxonomic categories, thereby predicting distributions of species richness across genera or families and the dependence of abundance and metabolic rate

Miller, W. Paul and Thomas C. Piechota, 2011. Trends in Western U.S. Snowpack and Related Upper Colorado River Basin Streamflow. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(6):1197–1210. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2011.00565.x Abstract: Water resource managers in the Western United

Staggered reproduction by an individual's offspring has the effect of insuring survival in an environment with high variability in pollinator effectiveness, germination, and seedling establishment.

Abstract Pollination is essential for ecosystem functioning, yet our understanding of the empirical consequences of species loss for plant–pollinator interactions remains limited. It is hypothesized that the loss of abundant and generalized (well‐connected) species from a pollination network will ha