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Community‐based conservation can play an important role in preserving biodiversity, but it is unclear whether such benefits extend to invertebrate communities; in particular, baseline data for insect communities is lacking to assess efficacy of conservation efforts. Here we evaluate ant assemblages across three habitats, protected within the Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary (WCHS) in the Upper West Region of Ghana. We compare relative ant species diversity and uniqueness between the sanctuary's Guinea savannah, riparian forest, and floodplain habitats. Ants were collected with other invertebrates using malaise traps, pitfall traps, and yellow pan traps between 2001 and 2011 multiple times per year. From these data, we compiled a list of ant species found, castes collected, and functional groups, and evaluated the differences in ant diversity among the habitats using accumulation curves, assemblage structure comparison, and Morisita‐Horn indices. We also compared the overall WCHS assemblage to other ant assemblages in Western Africa to gain a clearer understanding of relative diversity and uniqueness. We collected 83 species from seven subfamilies and 44 genera; 14 of the species were previously unrecorded in Ghana, including one ant species new to science. Ant species diversity differed among habitats in assemblage composition but not significantly in species richness. We found that the WCHS ant assemblage was relatively unique, sharing only about 35% of species found in similar Côte d'Ivoire habitats, and 25% of other Ghanaian assemblages. Some species present in the WCHS were not found in any of the other compared assemblages. We conclude that community‐based conservation initiatives like the WCHS may play an important role in conserving the biodiversity of ants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: Given climate change, species' climatically suitable habitats are increasingly expected to shift poleward. Some imperilled populations towards the poleward edge of their species' range might therefore conceivably benefit from climate change. Interactions between climate and population dynamics may be complex, however, with climate exerting effects both indirectly via influence over food availability and more directly, via effects on physiology and its implications for survival and reproduction. A thorough understanding of these interactions is critical for effective conservation management. We therefore examine the relationship between climate, survival and reproduction in Canadian black‐tailed prairie dogs, a threatened keystone species in an imperilled ecosystem at the northern edge of the species' range. Our analyses considered 8 years of annual mark–recapture data (2007–2014) in relation to growing degree days, precipitation, drought status and winter severity, as well as year, sex, age and body mass. Survival was strongly influenced by the interaction of drought and body mass class, and winter temperature severity. Female reproductive status was associated with the interaction of growing degree days and growing season precipitation, with spring precipitation and with winter temperature severity. Results related to body mass suggested that climatic variables exerted their effects via regulation of food availability with potential linked effects of food quality, immunological and behavioural implications, and predation risk. Predictions of future increases in drought conditions in North America's grassland ecosystems have raised concerns for the outlook of Canadian black‐tailed prairie dogs. Insights gained from the analyses, however, point to mitigating species management options targeted at decoupling the mechanisms by which climate exerts its negative influence. Our approach highlights the importance of understanding the interaction between climate and population dynamics in peripheral populations whose viability might ultimately determine their species' ability to track climatically suitable space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many indices have been proposed to measure functional diversity and its four distinct dimensions: functional richness, evenness, divergence and redundancy. Identifying indices that reliably measure the functional diversity dimension(s) of interest requires careful testing of how each index responds to species' traits and abundance distributions. In the absence of a convenient simulation tool, tests with artificial data have to date explored only a limited number of scenarios or have altered trait and abundance distributions only indirectly based on principles of evolution and community assembly. We provide simul.comms, an R function that allows users to test the efficacy of functional diversity indices by easily creating artificial species communities with user‐specified abundance and trait distributions for continuous, ordinal and categorical traits. To illustrate the function's utility, we examine the performance of R, a recently published abundance‐sensitive index for functional redundancy. We use two approaches to designing simulation tests for this example analysis. The first uses simul.comms to create six separate sets of artificial communities to qualitatively assess how R responds to predictable changes in functional redundancy. The second uses simul.comms to independently alter seven community composition parameters, whose influence on R is then examined quantitatively via effect sizes in linear regression. Our analyses indicate that R broadly mirrors expected changes in functional redundancy and predictably responds to changes in community composition parameters. R appears, however, to primarily reflect trait distributions, responding minimally to variance in abundance and counter‐intuitively to abundance range. Further refinement of tools to measure functional redundancy may therefore be desirable. The R tool we provide should assist with refining functional diversity measures, a critical step towards improving our ability to understand and mitigate the impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning. Because simul.comms simply produces two linked matrices, a species‐by‐traits matrix and a site‐by‐species abundance matrix, it may be equally valuable in exploring questions and analytical approaches in other areas of community ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given climate change, species' climatically suitable habitats are increasingly expected to shift poleward. Some imperilled populations towards the poleward edge of their species' range might therefore conceivably benefit from climate change. Interactions between climate and population dynamics may be complex, however, with climate exerting effects both indirectly via influence over food availability and more directly, via effects on physiology and its implications for survival and reproduction. A thorough understanding of these interactions is critical for effective conservation management. We therefore examine the relationship between climate, survival and reproduction in Canadian black-tailed prairie dogs, a threatened keystone species in an imperilled ecosystem at the northern edge of the species' range. Our analyses considered 8 years of annual mark-recapture data (2007-2014) in relation to growing degree days, precipitation, drought status and winter severity, as well as year, sex, age and body mass. Survival was strongly influenced by the interaction of drought and body mass class, and winter temperature severity. Female reproductive status was associated with the interaction of growing degree days and growing season precipitation, with spring precipitation and with winter temperature severity. Results related to body mass suggested that climatic variables exerted their effects via regulation of food availability with potential linked effects of food quality, immunological and behavioural implications, and predation risk. Predictions of future increases in drought conditions in North America's grassland ecosystems have raised concerns for the outlook of Canadian black-tailed prairie dogs. Insights gained from the analyses, however, point to mitigating species management options targeted at decoupling the mechanisms by which climate exerts its negative influence. Our approach highlights the importance of understanding the interaction between climate and population dynamics in peripheral populations whose viability might ultimately determine their species' ability to track climatically suitable space., (© 2017 The Authors. Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)