Find research datasets worth reusing

Divergent evolution of mutation rates and biases in the long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli

Abstract All organisms encode enzymes that replicate, maintain, pack, recombine, and repair their genetic material. For this reason, mutation rates and biases also evolve by mutation, variation, and natural selection. By examining metagenomic time series of the Lenski long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) with Escherichia coli (Good, et al. 2017), we find that local mutation rate variation has evolved during the LTEE. Each LTEE population has evolved idiosyncratic differences in their rates of point mutations, indels, and mobile element insertions, due to the fixation of various hypermutator and antimutator alleles. One LTEE population, called Ara+3, shows a strong, symmetric wave pattern in its density of point mutations, radiating from the origin of replication. This pattern is largely missing from the other LTEE populations, most of which evolved missense, indel, or structural mutations in topA, fis, and dusB— loci that all affect DNA topology. The distribution of mutations in those genes over time suggests epistasis and historical contingency in the evolution of DNA topology, which may have in turn affected local mutation rates. Overall, the replicate populations of the LTEE have largely diverged in their mutation rates and biases, even though they have adapted to identical abiotic conditions.

Data from: Influence of climate change and post-delisting management on long-term population viability of the conservation-reliant Kirtland's warbler

Rapid global climate change is resulting in novel abiotic and biotic conditions and interactions. Identifying management strategies that maximize probability of long-term persistence requires an understanding of the vulnerability of species to environmental changes. We sought to quantify the vulnerability of Kirtland's Warbler (Setophaga kirtlandii), a rare Neotropical migratory songbird that breeds almost exclusively in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and winters in the Bahamian Archipelago, to projected environmental changes on the breeding and wintering grounds. We developed a population-level simulation model that incorporates the influence of annual environmental conditions on the breeding and wintering grounds, and parameterized the model using empirical relationships. We simulated independent and additive effects of reduced breeding grounds habitat quantity and quality, and wintering grounds habitat quality, on population viability. Our results indicated the Kirtland's Warbler population is stable under current environmental and management conditions. Reduced breeding grounds habitat quantity resulted in reductions of the stable population size, but did not cause extinction under the scenarios we examined. In contrast, projected large reductions in wintering grounds precipitation caused the population to decline, with risk of extinction magnified when breeding habitat quantity or quality also decreased. Our study indicates that probability of long-term persistence for Kirtland's Warbler will depend on climate change impacts to wintering grounds habitat quality, and contributes to the growing literature documenting the importance of considering the full annual cycle for understanding population dynamics of migratory species.

The response of carbon assimilation and storage to long-term drought in tropical trees is dependent on light availability

1) Whether tropical trees acclimate to long-term drought stress remains unclear. This uncertainty is amplified if drought stress is accompanied by changes in other drivers such as the increases in canopy light exposure that might be induced by tree mortality or other disturbances. 2) Photosynthetic capacity, leaf respiration, non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) storage and stomatal conductance were measured on 162 trees at the world's longest running (15 yr) tropical forest drought experiment. We test whether surviving trees have altered strategies for carbon storage and carbon use in the drier and elevated light conditions present following drought-related tree mortality. 3) Relative to control trees, the surviving trees experiencing the drought treatment showed functional responses including: i) moderately reduced photosynthetic capacity; ii) increased total leaf NSC; and iii) a switch from starch to soluble sugars as the main store of branch NSC. This contrasts with earlier findings at this experiment of no change in photosynthetic capacity or NSC storage. The changes detected here only occurred in the subset of drought-stressed trees with canopies exposed to high radiation and were absent in trees with less-exposed canopies, and also in the community average. In contrast to previous results acquired through less intensive species sampling from this experiment, we also observe no species-average drought-induced change in leaf respiration. 4) Our results suggest that long-term responses to drought stress are strongly influenced by a tree's full-canopy light environment and therefore that disturbance-induced changes in stand density and dynamics are likely to substantially impact tropical forest responses to climate change. We also demonstrate that, while challenging, intensive sampling is essential in tropical forests to avoid sampling biases caused by limited taxonomic coverage.

Rainfall pulses mediate long-term plant community compositional dynamics in a semi-arid rangeland

1. Semi-arid rangelands, comprising more than 40% of the Earth's land surface, provide critical ecosystem services. Worldwide, these ecosystems are experiencing rapid degradation due to overgrazing and precipitation changes. However, how plants respond to these interacting factors remains relatively unexplored, and precisely which and how rainfall factors determine plant community dynamics in rangelands has not been well developed. 2. We used a long-term (1953‒2018) dataset from semi-arid rangeland to investigate coupled effects of grazing intensity and rainfall intensity (the total amount of precipitation) on different groups of plant cover (herbaceous, woody, and cacti plants) using linear mixed-effects models, redundancy analysis and structural equation models. We examined how rainfall intensity influenced plant cover dynamics according to pulse size (intensity over time) categories, which we analyzed at three scales: yearly, within the wet season only (June to September), and within the dry season only (October to May). 3. Plant community cover showed a humpbacked trend in the last six decades, mostly through changes in woody plants. Although both grazing intensity and rainfall presented similar humpbacked trends with plant community cover, our models demonstrated that the reduction of plant cover from the 1990s has been mainly caused by a decrease of rainfall rather than grazing intensity, particularly due to profound reductions of the intensity of relatively small rainfall pulses (e.g., 5.1 ~ 15 mm·day-1) during the dry season. Specifically, these small rainfall pulses can increase plant cover of all subgroups of woody and herbaceous species, thereby increasing plant community cover. Moreover, rainfall pulses during the wet season had negative effects on herbaceous species and positive effects on woody plants. These results suggest a phenological niche partitioning between woody plants and herbaceous in subtropical rangelands. 4. Synthesis and applications. Our results show how critical seasonal rainfall pulses are for regulating plant community compositional dynamics, which has significant implications for rangeland management and our ability to adapt and mitigate amplified climate influences in semi-arid ecosystems.

Long-term cloud forest response to climate warming revealed by insect speciation history

Montane cloud forests are areas of high endemism, and are one of the more vulnerable terrestrial ecosystems to climate change. Thus, understanding how they both contribute to the generation of biodiversity, and will respond to ongoing climate change, are important and related challenges. The widely accepted model for montane cloud forest dynamics involves upslope forcing of their range limits with global climate warming. However, limited climate data provides some support for an alternative model, where range limits are forced downslope with climate warming. Testing between these two models is challenging, due to the inherent limitations of climate and pollen records. We overcome this with an alternative source of historical information, testing between competing model predictions using genomic data and demographic analyses for a species of beetle tightly associated to an oceanic island cloud forest. Results unequivocally support the alternative model: populations that were isolated at higher elevation peaks during the Last Glacial Maximum are now in contact and hybridising at lower elevations. Our results suggest that genomic data is a rich source of information to further understand how montane cloud forest biodiversity originates, and how it is likely to be impacted by ongoing climate change.

Negative trait-based association between abundance of nitrogen fixing trees and long-term tropical forest biomass accumulation

1. Plant functional traits are thought to drive biomass production and biogeochemical cycling in tropical forests, but it remains unclear how nitrogen (N)-fixing legumes influence the functional traits of neighboring trees and forest-wide biomass dynamics. Further, the degree to which effects of N-fixers are density-dependent and may depend on stem size and spatial scale remain largely unknown. 2. Here, we examine 30-years of stem demography data for ~20,000 trees in a lowland tropical forest in Trinidad that span a wide range of functional traits thought to drive aboveground biomass (AGB) dynamics. 3. These forests show positive but decreasing long-term net AGB accumulation resulting from constant average productivity but increasing mortality of non-fixing trees over time. We find that high abundance of N-fixing trees is associated with compositional shifts in non-fixer functional traits that confer lower competitive performance and biomass accumulation. Across tree size classes, most interactions between N-fixers and non-fixers were negative, density dependent, and strongest at smaller spatial scales. 4. Synthesis. Overall, our findings suggest that local trait-based interactions between N-fixing and non-fixing trees can influence long-term carbon accumulation in tropical forests.

Bamboo phenology and life cycle drive seasonal and long-term functioning of Amazonian bamboo-dominated forests

1. Bamboo-dominated forests (BDF) extend over large areas in the drought-prone Southwestern Amazon, yet little is known about the dynamics of these ecosystems. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that bamboo modulates large-scale ecosystem dynamics through competition with coexisting trees for water. 2. We examined spatio-temporal patterns of remotely sensed metrics (Enhanced Vegetation Index [EVI], Normalized Difference Moisture Index [NDMI]) in >300 Landsat images as proxies for canopy leaf phenology and water content at two time scales: (1) a complete bamboo life cycle (~28 years), and (2) the seasonal cycle; and at two spatial scales: (a) comparing adjacent areas of BDF vs. Terra-firme forests (TFF) to investigate regional dynamics, and (b) comparing the vegetation classes of bamboo, trees in BDF, and trees in TFF to investigate the effects of bamboo on coexisting trees. 3. At the regional scale, BDF showed higher EVI (leaf area density) and lower NDMI (water content) than nearby TFF but these differences disappeared as bamboo died, suggesting a strong influence of bamboo life-stage in the functioning of these forests. BDF seasonal cycle showed a bimodal EVI pattern as trees and bamboos had asynchronized leaf production peaks. 4. At the scale of vegetation classes, trees in BDF showed lower NDMI (i.e., water content) than trees in TFF except after bamboo mortality, indicating a release from competition with bamboo for water. Canopy water content of trees in BDF was also reduced during bamboo dry-season greening (increased EVI ~ leaf production) due to increased water demands. Nevertheless, long-term and seasonal phenology of trees in BDF did not differ from that of trees in TFF suggesting a potential selection for drought-tolerant trees in BDF. 5. Synthesis. Bamboo-dominated forests have received less attention than other Amazonian forests and their functional dynamics are commonly ignored or misinterpreted. Using remote sensing to characterize forest phenology and water content, we show the distinctive seasonal and long-term dynamics of BDF and coexisting trees and the importance of bamboo competition for water in shaping this ecosystem. Our results suggest a potential selection for drought-tolerant trees in BDF since they maintain the same EVI as trees in bamboo-free forests but with lower water content. A better characterization of BDF and their cyclical dynamics is crucial for accurately interpreting Amazonian forests' responses to extreme climatic events such as high temperatures and droughts.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2020View details →

Data for "Rainfall-Runoff Prediction at Multiple Timescales with a Single Long Short-Term Memory Network"

Data for the paper "Rainfall-Runoff Prediction at Multiple Timescales with a Single Long Short-Term Memory Network" GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/gauchm/mts-lstm">https://github.com/gauchm/mts-lstm</a> This dataset contains the hourly NLDAS forcings and USGS streamflow data. For training with our codebase, we recommend using the combined NetCDF file, but you can also use the csv files (but it will take much longer to load the data).   Related Datasets: <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4071885">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4071885</a> contains the models trained with the forcings and streamflow from this dataset.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2020View details →

Models and Predictions for "Rainfall-Runoff Prediction at Multiple Timescales with a Single Long Short-Term Memory Network"

Models and Predictions for the paper "Rainfall-Runoff Prediction at Multiple Timescales with a Single Long Short-Term Memory Network" GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/gauchm/mts-lstm">https://github.com/gauchm/mts-lstm</a> Results The file `results.tar.gz` contains: <ul> <li>ensembled predictions for all models (generated from the models in `models/` using the <a href="https://neuralhydrology.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/neuralhydrology.utils.nh_results_ensemble.html">`nh-results-ensemble` command</a>). These predictions were used in the `results-analysis.ipynb` and `odelstm-analysis.ipynb` notebooks on the GitHub repository for the paper.</li> <li>the NWM predictions <ul> <li>`nwm_chrt_v2_1h.p` contains hourly NWM predictions for the CAMELS basins between 1993 and 2007. The file is derived from the reanalysis on <a href="https://docs.opendata.aws/nwm-archive/readme.html">aws</a>.</li> <li>`nwm_results.p` is derived from `nwm_chrt_v2_1h.p` and contains hourly and day-aggregated results and performance metrics for the test period of our paper.</li> </ul> </li> <li>a file `signatures.p` with hydrologic signatures that were calculated from the models' predictions. These signatures were used in the `results-analysis.ipynb` notebook on the GitHub repository for the paper.</li> </ul> Models The tar.gz files prefixed with `models-` contain the trained MTS-LSTM, sMTS-LSTM, and ODE-LSTM models from our experiments. For each experiment, there exist 10 model setups (one for each random seed). Besides the trained models, each model's tar.gz also contains the predictions on the test or validation perod and the configuration file used to train the model. MTS-LSTM <ul> <li>`mtslstm_seed*` -- the MTS-LSTM from the benchmarking section of the paper (using one forcings product, trained on daily and hourly data)</li> <li>`mtslstm_multiforcing_seed*` -- the MTS-LSTM from the section on per-timescale input data, experiment "multi-forcing B" (using just NLDAS as hourly inputs)</li> <li>`mtslstm_multiforcing_dailyhourly_seed*` -- the MTS-LTSM from the section on per-timescale input data, experiment "multi-forcing A" (ingesting daily forcings into the hourly model)</li> <li>`mtsltsm_136H1D_seed*` -- the MTS-LTSM from the section on prediction at other timescales (1-, 3-, 6-hourly and daily predictions)</li> </ul> sMTS-LSTM <ul> <li>`smtslstm_seed*` -- the sMTS-LSTM from the benchmarking section of the paper (using one forcings product, trained on daily and hourly data)</li> <li>`smtslstm_noregularization_seed*` -- the sMTS-LSTM from the section on cross-timescale consistency (trained without regularization)</li> </ul> Time-Continuous Experiments The file `models-timecontinuous.tar.gz` contains one sub-folder per basin on which we conducted our initial experiments. Each basin directory contains: <ul> <li>Experiment A (trained on daily and 12-hourly, evaluated on hourly): <ul> <li>`odelstm_a_seed*` -- the ODE-LSTM from experiment A</li> <li>`mtslstm_a_seed*` -- the MTS-LSTM from experiment A</li> </ul> </li> <li>Experiment B (trained on hourly and 3-hourly, evaluated on daily) <ul> <li>`odelstm_b_seed*` -- the ODE-LSTM from experiment B</li> <li>`mtslstm_b_seed*` -- the MTS-LSTM from experiment B</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Related Datasets: <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4072700">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4072700</a> contains the hourly NLDAS forcings and USGS streamflow required to use the models from this dataset.

Learning strategies and long-term memory in Asian short-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus) data

Data submitted here, are those used in the writing of our manuscript entitled "Learning strategies and long-term memory in Asian short-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus)" which has been submitted to Royal Society Open Science for publication. Abstract for that manuscript is below Social learning, namely learning from information acquired from others or their products, is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. There is growing evidence that animals selectively employ 'social learning strategies', which for example, determine when they should copy others instead of learning asocially, and whom they should copy. Furthermore, once animals have acquired new information, it is beneficial for them to commit it to long-term memory, especially when it concerns the discovery of profitable resources. Research into social learning strategies and long-term memory has covered a wide range of taxa. However, otters (subfamily Lutrinae), popular in zoos due to their sociability and playfulness, remained neglected until a recent study provided evidence of social learning in captive smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata), but not in Asian short-clawed otters (Aonyx cinereus). We investigated Asian short-clawed otters' learning strategies and long-term memory performance in a foraging context. We presented novel extractive foraging tasks twice to captive family groups and used network-based diffusion analysis to provide evidence of social learning and long-term memory in this species. A major cause of wild Asian short-clawed otter declines is prey scarcity. Furthering our understanding of how they learn about and remember novel food sources could inform key conservation strategies.

Long-term empirical evidence, early warning signals, and multiple drivers of regime shifts in a lake ecosystem

1. Catastrophic regime shifts in various ecosystems are increasing with the intensification of anthropogenic pressures. Understanding and predicting critical transitions are thus a key challenge in ecology. Previous studies have mainly focused on single environmental drivers (e.g., eutrophication) and early warning signals (EWSs) prior to population collapse. However, how multiple environmental stressors interact to shape ecological behaviour and whether EWSs were detectable prior to the recovery process in lake ecosystems are largely unknown. 2. We present long-term empirical evidence of the critical transition and hysteresis with the combined pressures of climate warming, eutrophication and trophic cascade effects by fish stocking in a subtropical Chinese lake in the Yangtze floodplain. The catastrophic regime shifts are cross-validated by 64-year multi-trophic level monitoring data and paleo-diatom records. 3. We show that EWSs are detectable in both the collapse and recovery trajectories and that including body size information in composite EWSs requires shorter time series data and can improve the predictive ability of regime shifts. Although full recovery has not yet been observed, EWSs prior to recovery provide us with the opportunity to take measures for a clear-water regime. 4. Climate warming and top-down cascade effects have a negative influence on water clarity by altering lower trophic level abundance and body size, which in turn have a negative effect on macrophyte abundance. Furthermore, we identify a shift in the dominant driving forces from bottom-up to top-down after regime shifts, decoupling the relationships between nutrients and biological components and thus decreasing the efficiency of nutrient reduction. 5. Synthesis This study provides new insights into ecological hysteresis under multiple external stressors and improves our understanding of trait-based EWSs in both the collapse and recovery processes in natural freshwater ecosystems. For management practice, our work suggests that slowing down climate warming and weakening the fish predation pressure on food webs are necessary to increase the effectiveness of nutrient reduction in the restoration of lakes.

opencc-zeroNov 2020View details →

Data from: Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies: the SPI-Birds data hub

1. The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild. Further, their number and global distribution provides a unique opportunity to assess the generality of patterns and to address broad-scale global issues (e.g. climate change). 2. To solve data integration issues and enable a new scale of ecological and evolutionary research based on long-term studies of birds, we have created the SPI-Birds Network and Database (www.spibirds.org) – a large-scale initiative that connects data from, and researchers working on, studies of wild populations of individually recognizable (usually ringed) birds. Within year and a half since the establishment, SPI-Birds has recruited over 120 members, and currently hosts data on almost 1.5 million individual birds collected in 80 populations over 2000 cumulative years, and counting. 3. SPI-Birds acts as a data hub and a catalogue of studied populations. It prevents data loss, secures easy data finding, use and integration, and thus facilitates collaboration and synthesis. We provide community-derived data and meta-data standards and improve data integrity guided by the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), and aligned with the existing metadata languages (e.g. ecological meta-data language). 4. The encouraging community involvement stems from SPI-Bird's decentralized approach: research groups retain full control over data use and their way of data management, while SPI-Birds creates tailored pipelines to convert each unique data format into a standard format. We outline the lessons learned, so that other communities (e.g. those working on other taxa) can adapt our successful model. Creating community-specific hubs (such as ours, COMADRE for animal demography, etc.) will aid much-needed large-scale ecological data integration.

Latent but not absent: the 'long tail' nature of rural special education and its dynamic correction mechanism

The 'long tail' nature of rural special education (RSE) suggests that it simultaneously possesses the private nature of discreteness and the public nature of externalities, which can easily cause provision insufficiency. However, this mismatch may have a dynamic intertemporal correction mechanism impacted by different expenditures of supply sectors (governments and other social sectors). This paper uses different models and data from 30 provinces in China from 2003-2014 to analyze this dynamic correction mechanism. This research finds that different kinds of expenditures from different suppliers have divergent effects on this correction. Capital expenses (especially infrastructure construction) have significantly positive effects on the correction, but administrative expenses have significant dual effects on the correction. These effects may be caused by the various governance efficiencies and motivations of all stakeholders in RSE. This paper concludes that we should pay more attention to the accurate recognition and effective satisfaction of RSE affected by the governance efficiency and motivation of different suppliers to achieve this dynamic correction.

opencc-by-4.0Nov 2020View details →

The datasets for the paper "The long-lived and recent seismicity at the lunar Orientale basin: Evidence from morphology and formation ages of boulder avalanches, tectonics and seismic ground motion" JGR: Planets (e2020JE006553)

The datasets contain supporting files for the paper: Mohanty, R., Kumar, P.S., Raghukanth, S.T.G., & Lakshmi, K.J.P., (2020). The long-lived and recent seismicity at the lunar Orientale basin: Evidence from morphology and formation ages of boulder avalanches, tectonics and seismic ground motion, JGR: Planets, e2020JE006553.

opencc-by-4.0Nov 2020View details →

AERA5-Asia: A long-term Asian precipitation dataset (0.1°, 1 hourly, 1951–2015, Asia) anchoring the ERA5-Land under the total volume control by APHRODITE (1999–2015)

AERA5-Asia: A long-term Asian precipitation dataset (0.1°, 1 hourly, 1951–2015, Asia) is developed by organically combining the ERA5-Land dataset with high spatiotemporal resolutions and continuity and the APHRODITE dataset with high quality. How to cite: Ma, Z., Xu, J., Ma, Y., Zhu, S., He, K., Zhang, S., Ma, W., Xu, X., 2022. AERA5-Asia: A long-term Asian precipitation dataset (0.1°, 1 hourly, 1951–2015, Asia) anchoring the ERA5-Land under the total volume control by APHRODITE. Bulletin of American Meteorological Society, 103 (4)., DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0328.1. Data Format: GeoTIFF Spatial Coverage: 60°E–150°E, 15°S–55°N, land. AERA5-Asia (0.1°/ hourly, 1951–1966, Asia) is available at  <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3609352">https://doi.org/</a><a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4266081">10.5281/zenodo.6367463</a> AERA5-Asia (0.1°/ hourly, 1962–1981, Asia) is available at  <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3609352">https://doi.org/</a><a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4266081">10.5281/zenodo.6369796</a> AERA5-Asia (0.1°/ hourly, 1982–1998, Asia) is available at  <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3609352">https://doi.org/</a><a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4266081">10.5281/zenodo.4266081</a>

opencc-zeroNov 2020View details →

Acquisition of object-robbing and object/food-bartering behaviors: A culturally maintained token economy in free-ranging long-tailed macaques

The token exchange paradigm shows that monkeys and great apes are able to use objects as symbolic tools to request specific food rewards. Such studies provide insights into the cognitive underpinnings of economic behavior in non-human primates. However, the ecological validity of these lab-based experimental situations tends to be limited. Our field research aims to address the need for a more ecologically valid primate model of trading systems in humans. Around the Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia, a large free-ranging population of long-tailed macaques spontaneously and routinely engage in token-mediated bartering interactions with humans. These interactions occur in two phases: after stealing inedible and more or less valuable objects from humans, the macaques appear to use them as tokens, by returning them to humans in exchange for food. Our field observational and experimental data showed (1) age differences in robbing/bartering success, indicative of experiential learning, and (2) clear behavioral associations between value-based token possession and quantity or quality of food rewards rejected and accepted by subadult and adult monkeys, suggestive of robbing/bartering payoff maximization and economic decision-making. This population-specific, prevalent, cross-generational, learned and socially influenced practice may be the first example of a culturally maintained token economy in free-ranging animals.

Data from: Inter- and intra-specific variation of spider mite susceptibility to fungal infections: implications for the long-term success of biological control

Spider mites are severe pests of several annual and perennial crops worldwide, often causing important economic damages. As rapid evolution of pesticide resistance in this group hampers the efficiency of chemical control, alternative control strategies, such as the use of entomopathogenic fungi, are being developed. However, while several studies have focused on the evaluation of the control potential of different fungal species and/or isolates as well as their compatibility with other control methods (e.g. predators or chemical pesticides), knowledge on the extent of inter- and intraspecific variation in spider mite susceptibility to fungal infection is as yet incipient. Here, we measured the mortality induced by two generalist fungi, Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium brunneum, in 12 spider mite populations belonging to different Tetranychus species: T. evansi, T. ludeni, the green form of T. urticae and the red form of T. urticae, within a full factorial experiment. We found that spider mite species differed in their susceptibility to infection by both fungal species. Moreover, we also found important intraspecific variation for this trait. These results draw caution on the development of single strains as biocontrol agents. Indeed, the high level of intraspecific variation suggests that (a) the one-size-fits-all strategy may fail to control spider-mite populations and (b) hosts resistance to infection may evolve at a rapid pace. Finally, we propose future directions to better understand this system and improve the long-term success of spider mite control strategies based on entomopathogenic fungi.

Datasets used for the publication: State-dependence explains individual variation in nest defence behaviour in a long-lived bird

The uploaded datasets were used to test if variation in states predicts nest defence behaviour (a 'risky' behaviour) in a long-lived species, the barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis). Repeated measures of nest defence towards a human intruder (flight initiation distance or FID) of females of known age were collected during 15 breeding seasons. Increasing values of FID represent increasing shyness. Adaptive models have predicted that an individual's residual reproductive value or 'asset' is an important state variable underlying variation in such risk-taking behaviour. Hence, we used this data to investigate how nest defence varies as a function of time of the season and individual age, two state variables that can vary between and within individuals and determine asset.

Data for: Early-life behavior predicts first-year survival in a long-distance avian migrant

Early-life conditions have critical, long-lasting effects on the fate of individuals, yet early-life activity has rarely been linked to subsequent survival of animals in the wild. Using high-resolution GPS and body-acceleration data of 93 juvenile white storks (Ciconia ciconia), we examined the links between behavior during both pre-fledging and post-fledging (fledging-to-migration) periods and subsequent first year survival. Juvenile daily activity (based on overall dynamic body acceleration) showed repeatable between-individual variation, the juveniles' pre and post-fledging activity levels were correlated, and both were positively associated with subsequent survival. Daily activity increased gradually throughout the post-fledging period, and the relationship between post-fledging activity and survival was stronger in individuals who increased their daily activity level faster (an interaction effect). We suggest that high activity profiles signified individuals with increased pre-migratory experience, higher individual quality and perhaps more proactive personality, which could underlie their superior survival rates. The duration of individuals' fledging-to-migration periods had a hump-shaped relationship with survival: higher survival was associated with intermediate rather than short or long durations. Short durations reflect lower pre-migratory experience, whereas very long ones were associated with slower increases in daily activity level which possibly reflects slow behavioral development. In accordance with previous studies, heavier nestlings and those that hatched and migrated earlier had increased survival. Using extensive tracking data, our study exposed new links between early-life attributes and survival, suggesting that early activity profiles in migrating birds can explain variation in first-year survival.

Age-related reproductive performance of the Adélie Penguin, a long-lived seabird exhibiting similar outcomes regardless of individual life-history strategy

1. Age-related variation in reproductive performance in long-lived iteroparous vertebrate species is common, with performance being influenced by within-individual processes, such as improvement and senescence, in combination with among-individual processes, such as selective appearance and disappearance. Few studies of age-related reproductive performance have compared the role of these drivers within a metapopulation, subject to varying degrees of resource competition. 2. We accounted for within- and among-individuals changes among known-aged Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) during 17 years (1997 to 2013), at three clustered colonies of disparate size, to understand patterns in age-related reproductive success during early and late adulthood. 3. Age at first reproduction (AFR) was lowest, and number of breeding attempts highest, at the largest colony. Regardless of AFR, success improved with early post-recruitment experience. For both oldest and youngest recruitment groups, peak performance occurred at the end of their reproductive lifespan indicating a possible cost of reproduction. Intermediate recruitment groups reached peak performance in their mid-reproductive lifespan and with intermediate breeding experience, before decreasing. Breeding success was lowest for the initial breeding attempt regardless of AFR, but we observed subsequent variation relative to recruitment age. Gaining experience by delaying recruitment positively influenced reproductive performance early in the reproductive lifespan, and was most evident for the youngest breeders. Oldest recruits had the highest initial and peak breeding success. Differences in AFR resulted in tradeoffs in reproductive lifespan or timing of senescence but not in the overall number of breeding attempts. 4. Patterns differed as a function of colony size, and thus competition for resources. Early life improvement in performance at the larger colonies was primarily due to within-individual factors and at the largest colony, AFR. Regardless of colony size late-life performance was positively related to the age at last reproduction, indicating selective disappearance of lower performing individuals. 5. These results highlight that different life-history strategies were equally successful, indicating that individuals can overcome potential tradeoffs associated with early- and late-life performance. These results have important implications for understanding the evolution of life-history strategies responsible for driving population change.