Research news from the Ecological Society of America
January 10, 2025
For Immediate Release
Contact: Mayda Nathan, mayda@esa.org
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 deep-sea mining’s impacts, the effects of climate change on bald eagles, the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability, forecasting future species ranges and the influence of climate and land-use changes on the battle between burying beetles and blowflies.
From Ecological Applications:
Predicting the (possibly abysmal) impacts of mining the abyss
Author contact: Laura Kaikkonen (laura.kaikkonen@iki.fi)
Scouring the seafloor for the metals, rare-earth elements and other resources needed to run the modern world likely causes extensive damage to deep-sea ecosystems, but determining the full scope of destruction at such depths is challenging. Records of seafloor ecosystems before and after mining operations are hard to collect and extremely scarce. To help scientists, regulators and mining companies make better predictions about ecological risk, the authors of this study developed a method that integrates field and experimental data with expert knowledge to estimate the risk of mining-induced damage — burial due to sediment kicked up in the water, for instance — for a wide range of seafloor inhabitants. When applied to a case study off eastern New Zealand, the site of a proposed mining operation for phosphorite nodules, the model suggested that not only would most seabed organisms experience immediate declines in abundance, they would fail to rebound even a year following the disturbance. By using multiple lines of evidence and accounting for scientific uncertainty, the new approach offers a better way forward for environmental assessment of deep-sea resource extraction and conservation of the unique ecosystems at the bottom of the world’s oceans.
Read the article: Probabilistic ecological risk assessment for deep-sea mining: A Bayesian network for Chatham Rise, Pacific Ocean
From Ecosphere:
A recent Ecosphere study documents the impacts of food and climate (including intense marine heatwaves) on bald eagle reproduction in Alaska.
Image credit: Mary Lynn Stephenson | Public Domain
Bald eagles boosted by salmon, but not by heatwaves
Author contact: Joshua H. Schmidt (joshua_schmidt@nps.gov)
Bald eagles are adaptable birds, able to eat a wide variety of fish as well as other prey and even carrion, but new research suggests climate change may pose a challenge for these resourceful raptors. Analyzing over 30 years of breeding data from four national parks in Alaska, the researchers set out to determine how the abundance of salmon (a primary food source for nesting eagles) and weather conditions (including a major marine heatwave from 2014 to 2016) have shaped the eagles’ reproductive success along the Alaskan coast over time. The analysis revealed that nest success tended to improve when salmon were abundant and when springs were warmer and drier, but that the eagles fared poorly during the marine heatwave years. The study authors point to other research showing that the 2014–16 marine heatwave drove declines in forage fish like herring and in seabirds like gulls — both important alternatives to salmon for bald eagles. With climate change making intense marine heatwaves more likely, Alaska’s bald eagles may come to rely even more on the region’s salmon, as long as the salmon themselves can take the heat.
Read the article: The effects of spatiotemporal variation in marine resources on the occupancy dynamics of a terrestrial avian predator
From Ecology:
Two bees or not two bees, that is the question
Author contact: Mark A. Genung (mark.a.genung@gmail.com)
Why are more bees better? This is the question motivating a new study that examines why processes like plant growth or decomposition are often more constant in time or over space in more biodiverse ecosystems. To understand why biodiversity and stability often go hand in hand, the researchers focused on the constancy of pollination services provided by native bees at New Jersey blueberry farms. The farms varied in the amount and arrangement of neighboring natural land, letting the researchers calculate how different bees responded to the differing environments — and whether these differences helped stabilize pollination. The analysis revealed that diversity in how bees respond to varied environments was a good predictor of pollination stability, suggesting that farms with higher bee diversity see benefits akin to a diversified stock portfolio. However, one bee species, Andrena bradleyi, played an outsized role; this blueberry specialist thrived in areas with intense berry farming, making it a key stabilizer. The study highlights how biodiversity benefits are accrued, and how they can sometimes depend more on specific species than on the sheer numbers of species present.
Read the article: Dominant species stabilize pollination services through response diversity, but not cross-scale redundancy
From Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment:
A study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment offers a simple strategy for identifying species that are likely to shift their distributions as the climate changes.
Image credit: D. Dzurisin, USGS | Public Domain
Who’s ready to take the leap?
Author contact: Peter D. Billman (peter.billman@uconn.edu)
Plants and animals around the world are on the march, in search of suitable environmental conditions under a rapidly changing global climate. Yet predicting where, how fast and how far species can move is proving to be a tricky task, often requiring construction of complex, data-intensive models. Now, the authors of a new study have devised a surprisingly straightforward method for improving future range shift projections: simply find out where the organism is most common. For example, if an alpine species like the yellow-bellied marmot (shown here) is most abundant at the very highest elevations where it occurs, we might expect its lower range to contract upward as the climate warms. By comparing known historical versus current distributions across a wide range of organisms and geographic locations, the study authors confirmed that such “leaning” populations are indeed reliable indicators of future movement. This strategy of finding where a species is most abundant within its range will help managers decide which species should be the targets of conservation efforts as the climate changes.
Read the article: Forecasting range shifts using abundance distributions along environmental gradients
From Ecological Monographs:
Beetle habitat loss a bonanza for blowflies
Author contact: Sheng-Feng Shen (shensf@sinica.edu.tw)
New research on carrion-loving insects shows how, for social animals, habitat loss can amplify the impacts of climate change. Researchers studying burying beetles in Taiwan discovered that when forests are cleared, beetle populations shrink. These beetles, which rely on cooperation to bury and defend carrion from competing blowflies, struggle to thrive in hotter areas if their group sizes are too small. In intact forests, larger beetle groups can handle warmer conditions, but habitat loss disrupts their ability to form these cooperative teams. This leaves them more vulnerable to competition and narrows the range of temperatures they can tolerate. The study highlights how social behaviors can break down when populations decline due to human-altered landscapes, and underline the need to preserve habitats to help wildlife face the twin challenges of climate and land-use changes.
Read the article: Land-use changes influence climate resilience through altered population demography in a social insect
###
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
Follow ESA on social media:
Twitter/X – @esa_org
Bluesky – @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social
Instagram – @ecologicalsociety
Facebook – @esa.org