0000000000822162
AUTHOR
Marjo Saastamoinen
Effects of environment and genotype on dispersal differ across departure, transfer and settlement in a butterfly metapopulation
Active dispersal is driven by extrinsic and intrinsic factors at the three stages of departure, transfer and settlement. Most empirical studies capture only one stage of this complex process, and knowledge of how much can be generalized from one stage to another remains unknown. Here we use genetic assignment tests to reconstruct dispersal across 5 years and 232 habitat patches of a Glanville fritillary butterfly ( Melitaea cinxia ) metapopulation. We link individual dispersal events to weather, landscape structure, size and quality of habitat patches, and individual genotype to identify the factors that influence the three stages of dispersal and post-settlement survival. We found that ne…
Climate change reshuffles northern species within their niches
Climate change is a pervasive threat to biodiversity. While range shifts are a known consequence of climate warming contributing to regional community change, less is known about how species' positions shift within their climatic niches. Furthermore, whether the relative importance of different climatic variables prompting such shifts varies with changing climate remains unclear. Here we analysed four decades of data for 1,478 species of birds, mammals, butterflies, moths, plants and phytoplankton along a 1,200 km high latitudinal gradient. The relative importance of climatic drivers varied non-uniformly with progressing climate change. While species turnover among decades was limited, the …
Supplementary Methods, Tables, and Figures from Effects of environment and genotype on dispersal differ across departure, transfer and settlement in a butterfly metapopulation
Further details on measurement of environmental covariates and simulations, Tables S1-S6 and Figures S1-S7
Complex plant quality—microbiota–population interactions modulate the response of a specialist herbivore to the defence of its host plant
Many specialist herbivores have evolved strategies to cope with plant defences, with gut microbiota potentially participating to such adaptations. In this study, we assessed whether the history of plant use (population origin) and microbiota may interact with plant defence adaptation. We tested whether microbiota enhance the performance of Melitaea cinxia larvae on their host plant, Plantago lanceolata and increase their ability to cope the defensive compounds, iridoid glycosides (IGs). The gut microbiota were significantly affected by both larval population origin and host plant IG level. Contrary to our prediction, impoverishing the microbiota with antibiotic treatment did not reduce larv…
Landscape structure, habitat quality and metapopulation structure as predictors of population size of the Glanville fritillary butterfly
Spatial variation in population size is affected by many factors, which makes it hard to evaluate the appropriateness of empirical models of population sizes or range dynamics. To complicate matters further in dynamic and spatially structured populations, such as metapopulations, spatial interactions via dispersal as well as local extinctions and colonizations confound the effects of environmental factors. Additionally, while a wealth of ”coarse” environmental data are available for most terrestrial ecosystems it is difficult to know how adequate such data are for explaining abundance compared to situations where more detailed habitat and demographic data are also available. The acquisition…