The effectiveness of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control,pollination services and crop yield: a quantitative synthesis

Floral plantings are promoted to foster ecological intensification of agriculture through provisioning of ecosystem services. However, a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of different floral plantings, their characteristics and consequences for crop yield is lacking. Here we quantified the impacts of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control (18 studies) and pollination services (17 studies) in adjacent crops in North America, Europe and New Zealand. Flower strips, but not hedgerows, enhanced pest control services in adjacent fields by 16% on average. However, effects on crop pollination and yield were more variable. Our synthesis identifies several important drivers of variability in effectiveness of plantings: pollination services declined exponentially with distance from plantings, and perennial and older flower strips with higher flowering plant diversity enhanced pollination more effectively. These findings provide promising pathways to optimise floral plantings to more effectively contribute to ecosystem service delivery and ecological intensification of agriculture in the future.     

Acknowledging uncertainty in evolutionary reconstructions of ecological niches

Reconstructing ecological niche evolution can provide insight into the biogeography and diversification of evolving lineages. However, comparative phylogenetic methods may infer the history of ecological niche evolution inaccurately because (a) species' niches are often poorly characterized; and (b) phylogenetic comparative methods rely on niche summary statistics rather than full estimates of species' environmental tolerances. Here, we propose a new framework for coding ecological niches and reconstructing their evolution that explicitly acknowledges and incorporates the uncertainty introduced by incomplete niche characterization. Then, we modify existing ancestral state inference methods to leverage full estimates of environmental tolerances. We provide a worked empirical example of our method, investigating ecological niche evolution in the New World orioles (Aves: Passeriformes: Icterus spp.). Temperature and precipitation tolerances were generally broad and conserved among orioles, with niche reduction and specialization limited to a few terminal branches. Tools for performing these reconstructions are available in a new R package called nichevol.     

Correction to: Microhabitats of sharknose goby (Elacatinus evelynae) cleaning stations and their links with cleaning behaviour

Coral Reefs - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-021-02111-z     

Seasonal variation in reef fish assemblages in the environmentally extreme southern Persian/Arabian Gulf

The southern Persian/Arabian Gulf experiences extreme seasonal temperature variation (> 20 °C) making it among the most hostile reef environments on Earth. Previous anecdotal evidence has suggested that seasonal temperature changes may influence regional reef fish assemblages, but to date research has been limited. To examine the influence of temperature on reef fish abundance and composition, we performed visual surveys in summer and in winter over three years at three reefs in the southern Gulf (Dhabiya, Saadiyat and Ras Ghanada). Overall abundance of fishes was 40% higher in summer than in winter, and multivariate analyses showed strong and significant differences in overall seasonal community structure, consistent at all sites and across all years. Seasonal differences were largely driven by nine of the 30 observed species, which together accounted for 70% of the divergence in community structure between summer and winter. Of these nine species, Lutjanus ehrenbergii, Lutjanus fulviflamma, Plectorhinchus sordidus and Abudefduf vaigiensis were significantly more abundant in summer, Parupeneus margaritatus and Acanthopagrus bifasciatus, were significantly more common on reefs in winter. We discuss these changes in terms of seasonal physiological and ecological constraints, and explore the implications of these changes on the functional ecology of reef fishes in this thermally variable and extreme environment.