With rapidly changing technology we are seeing a number of innovative ways emerging that can engage young people and help them understand some of the complexities of ecology. In the following example submitted by Riley Pratt and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, we see how fruitful collaboration between ecologists and computer scientists can be within the field of ecological e...

In their letter, Dekel et al. (1) comment on our recent findings on the origin of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) 15,000 y ago, ecological impacts of the first settled hunter-gatherers, and insights that this study provides on early domestication processes (2). They maintain that mice were parasitic with humans rather than commensal, and attracted by refuse and feeding opportunities in nom...

The production of phenotype is regulated by differential gene expression. However, the regulators of gene expression need not all reside within the embryo. Environmental factors, such as temperature, photoperiod, diet, population density, or the presence of predators, can produce specific phenotypes, presumably by altering gene-expression patterns. The field of ecological developmental biology ...

Most studies that forecast the ecological consequences of climate change target a single species and a single life stage. Depending on climatic impacts on other life stages and on interacting species, however, the results from simple experiments may not translate into accurate predictions of future ecological change. Research needs to move beyond simple experimental studies and environmental en...

Our planet is changing rapidly, and responding to the ensuing environmental challenges will require an informed citizenry that can understand the inherent complexity of ecological systems. However, microorganisms are usually neglected in the narratives that we use to understand nature. Here, we advocate for the inclusion of microbial ecology across education levels and delineate the often negle...

Environmental management typically seeks to increase or maintain the population sizes of desirable species and to decrease population sizes of undesirable pests, pathogens, or invaders. With changes in population size come long-recognized changes in ecological processes that act in a density-dependent fashion. While the ecological effects of density dependence have been well studied, the evolut...

Use and characteristics of the minor rural road network have changed dramatically in West-European intensive agricultural landscapes. These changes are caused by modern agriculture, by changing values of the road’s verges and by the multifunctionalization of the rural landscape. Changing the network, conventional farming practices often decrease landscape ecological stability. These problems ca...

Most accounts of thresholds between alternate regimes involve a single, dominant shift defined by one, often slowly changing variable in an ecosystem. This paper expands the focus to include similar dynamics in social and economic systems, in which multiple variables may act together in ways that produce interacting regime shifts in social-ecological systems. We use four different regions in th...

Biologists have long been fascinated by species’ borders, and with good reason. Understanding the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species’ borders may prove to be the key that unlocks new understanding across a wide range of biological phenomena. After all, geographic range limits are a point of entry into understanding the ecological niche and threshold responses to environmental chang...