Farmland species face many threats, including habitat loss and malnutrition during key periods of their life cycle. This is aggravated in conventionally managed monocultures, leading to nutrient deficiencies that impair the survival reproduction farmland wildlife. For instance, protein wheat or vitamin B3 deficiency maize reduce by up 87% reproductive success critically endangered common hamste...

The reproductive success of wild birds has been affected by exposure to multiple contaminants. Reproduction of captive American kestrels (Falco sparverius) was suppressed when adult birds were exposed to dietary polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). In this study, the reproductive effects of in ovo exposure to PCBs is explored, along with determining effects on reproduction in second-generation bir...

Variation in fitness between individuals in populations may be attributed to differing environmental conditions experienced among birth (or hatch) years (i.e., between cohorts). In this study, we tested whether cohort fitness could also be explained by environmental conditions experienced in years post-hatch, using 736 lifelong resighting histories of Greenland white-fronted geese (Anser albifr...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Global pollinator declines and continued habitat fragmentation highlight the critical need to understand reproduction and gene flow across plant populations. Plant size, conspecific density and local kinship (i.e. neighbourhood genetic relatedness) have been proposed as important mechanisms influencing the reproductive success of flowering plants, but have rarely been simult...

Irregular fruit production across successive years is a major issue that limits the profitability of most temperate and tropical fruit crops. It is particularly affected by the reciprocal relationships between vegetative and reproductive growth. The concept of the costs of reproduction is defined in terms of losses in the potential future reproductive success caused by current investment in rep...

Traits that influence reproductive success and contribute to reproductive isolation in animal and plant populations are a central focus of evolutionary biology. In the present study we used an experimental approach to demonstrate the occurrence of environmental effects on sexual and asexual reproduction, and provide evidence for sexual plasticity and inter-clonal fertilization in laboratory-cul...

Effective management of wetland quantity and quality is crucial for effective conservation of declining amphibian populations. In particular, frogs and toads that employ aggregative breeding strategies may suffer negative population impacts in response to changes in availability of aquatic breeding habitat, including overabundance of suitable habitat, if density of conspecifics attending aggreg...