A recent contribution to Ecology and Evolution proposed a novel pedagogical innovation. In reviewing this paper, it inspired innovations in teaching and student-led work in two other ecology and evolution course offering. This viewpoint highlights that work and extends it to other potential applications for students and for instructors in how they teach.

Course-based research, community engagement, and international experiences can enhance undergraduate biology education, but each were made more challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we describe a scalable course-based undergraduate research experience focusing on African goat behavior that integrates research and community engagement in a remote international experience. Educational benefits for students were complemented by the fact that international educational partners facing economic hardship due to the pandemic could receive payment for services.

The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a trustworthy, stable data repository, and data management support organization for the environmental scientist providing tools and support that allow the environmental researcher to easily integrate data publishing into the research workflow. We discuss how comprehensive metadata and the repository infrastructure lead to highly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data by evaluating compliance with specific community proposed FAIR criteria and review measures and patterns of data (re)use, assuring that EDI is fulfilling its stated premise.

We report for the first time the naturalization of Cydonia oblonga in China and East Asia based on community structure and population dynamics at a fine scale. We conducted a comprehensive survey of the species through field community investigation, interviews, and literature information. The results suggest that alien species closely related to native species are more likely to invade, naturalize, and become dominant species in local habitats, which strongly supports the “pre-adaptation hypothesis” at a fine scale.

Diversifying curricula is of increasing interest in higher education, including in ecology and evolution and allied fields. Here we provide a framework for meeting standard curriculum goals while enacting anti-racist and anti-colonial updates to syllabi and we share the list of resources our group has developed. Our hope is that our fellow educators will use this paper to catalyze their own efforts to diversify their courses.

In this study, we investigated the phylogeography of the endangered “eyed” turtles (genus Sacalia) and gave a thorough grasp of lineage divergence, regional distribution, and gene flow in this genus' populations. We further confirm that the “hybrid eyed turtles” are a natural lineage developed from interspecific hybridization between S. bealei and S. quadriocellata. The conservation management of this genus will benefit greatly from these taxonomic and phylogenetic findings.

To better understand the affective domain of students participating in field biology, we coded over 700 journal reflections and developed a Framework of Student Affect in Field Biology. We share novel insights into student affect and make practical recommendations for instructors of undergraduate field biology courses.

All lepidosaurians have ventricles composed of the compact layer as well as the trabeculae. Proportion between compact wall and trabeculae differs among squamates in correlation with their physiological needs and ecological niche. Phylogeny and ecological niche are reflected on heart morphology in the group Anguimorpha.

Using extensive evaluation data, we show how field studies support students to develop a coherent and nuanced understanding of how to approach and execute ecological studies. We illustrate how field course elements can be used to provide cognitive, affective, and reflective tools that allow students to gain maximum value from their educational journey, and the confidence to consider research in their future careers.

Functional rarity represents a promising concept to better understand the ecological importance of rare species and may be a useful tool to protect functional diversity more efficiently. We investigate patterns and drivers of plant functional rarity in German hay meadows on both the species level (which species are functionally rare and why) and the community level (how is functional rarity associated with species richness and environmental conditions). Our results suggest that functional rarity is not necessarily relevant for nature conservation but can serve as a useful tool to better understand why species are rare in a habitat and under which conditions these species occur.

Water-filled tree holes are unique ecosystems that are inhabited by insect larvae, mesofauna and other organisms. In our review and meta-analysis we show that most studies on tree-hole inhabitants focus on selected or even single species, and that the few community studies consistently found positive effects of tree-hole size and resources on abundance and richness of inhabitants, sometimes modulated by environmental parameters such as annual temperature. We identify potential avenues for future research and argue that a better understanding of water-filled tree holes will facilitate their use as model systems for addressing fundamental ecological questions and as indicator systems of the impacts of environmental change on ecosystems.

The study in this paper focuses on a model transferability case study to design and implement model adaption guidelines. Our guidelines demonstrate how to adapt a general DBN to specific ecosystems in order to maximise model reuse and minimise re-development effort, which is especially, which is especially relevant from a transferability perspective, are guidelines for ecosystems with limited data.

We describe an authentic research activity (ARE) activity that leverages digitized diet data from natural history collections to provide students with collaborative research experience across any learning environment. Using magnified photographs of frog stomach contents collected in the Peruvian Amazon, we designed an open-source “bowl game” competition that challenges students to identify, measure, and compare diet items across vouchered frog specimens (“Batrachian Barf Bowl”). This activity offers a model for combining game-based learning with museum collections to provide experiential research opportunities highlighting the power of scientific collaboration.

1. About 64.8% of respondents reported conflict into two major groups - crop damage (31.4%) and livestock depredations (6.2%) and were relatively high in summer and frequently occurred in areas closer forest between the 2700m to 3000m asl. We identified four clusters of HBC, and the hotspots lies in clusters 2 and 4. #10; #10;2. We found that anthropogenic food provisioning of bears, livestock grazing in bear habitats and poor knowledge of animal behaviour among the communities are the major causes of HBC. #10;3. We suggest proper disposal of horticulture crop waste, mass awareness among communities, controlled and supervised grazing as an immediate management strategy to reduce the HBC.

This work combines three sources of data to investigate the distribution and population structure of a threatened shark species.

Benefits of ecological restoration are often associated with time lags, as many attributes, such as leaf litter and coarse woody debris, need time to accumulate, particularly in arid ecosystems. Here we used a 2 year MBACI experiment to test if adding woody debris to restored eucalypt woodlands in semi-arid western Australia can accelerate restoration outcomes. We found that only few abiotic and biotic variables responded positively, and conclude that detectable benefits of additional restoration actions may be slow in arid ecosystems.

We used whole-genome sequencing data for carpenter ants (Genus Camponotus; subgenera Camponotus and Tanaemyrmex) and their Blochmannia endosymbionts as our study system to address whether Camponotus demography shapes Blochmannia molecular evolution. We found that host demography was associated with Blochmannia shifts toward increased selection strengths, but not associated with Blochmannia selection relaxation, positive selection, genetic drift rates, or genome size evolution. Additionally, we found that Blochmannia genome size evolution was associated with genome-wide estimates of genetic drift and number of genes with relaxed selection pressures.

We explored the potential role of environmental gradients, species traits and phylogenetic relatedness in shaping assemblages of specialist river birds in the Himalayan mountains - where this group reaches its greatest richness on Earth. Assemblage composition and trait representation changed markedly with elevation through a combination of habitat filtering and functional clustering reflecting large habitat heterogeneity, but phylogenetic patterns were also clear.

We reported the death of 45 Asian Openbill (Anastomus oscitans) in hail in the tropical area of Southern China, this is the first report of hail-caused bird mortality in the region. We found the Asian Openbill is the only species killed by the hail, but no obvious fluctuation was observed for the species’ population four months later. This research provides important information for bird's response to climate change.

Coloration of animals is important for camouflage, for social behavior or for physiological fitness. Aglais urticae butterflies reared at temperatures between 7 and 34°C show at constant conditions a negative correlation between ambient temperature and pigmentation intensity. Darker imagines show a stronger increased body temperature after 5 min of defined illumination which provides an ecological advantage.