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1. Editorial: Symbiotic Relationships as Shapers of Biodiversity

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.850572  

   Chomicki, Guillaume; Beinart, Roxanne; Prada, Carlos; Ritchie, Kimberly B.; Weber, Marjorie Gail (February 2022, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution)
2. Perception of Spatial Relationships in Impossible Spaces

   Robb, A; Barwulor, C (October 2019, ACM Symposium on Applied Perception)

   Impossible spaces have been used to increase the amount of virtual space available for real walking within a constrained physical space. In this technique, multiple virtual rooms are allowed to occupy overlapping portions of the physical space, in a way which is not possible in real euclidean space. Prior work has explored detection thresholds for impossible spaces, however very little work has considered other aspects of how impossible spaces alter participants' perception of spatial relationships within virtual environments. In this paper, we present a within-subjects study $(n=30)$ investigating how impossible spaces altered participants perceptions of the location of objects placed in different rooms. Participants explored three layouts with varying amounts of overlap between rooms and then pointed in the direction of various objects they had been tasked to locate. Significantly more error was observed when pointing at objects in overlapping spaces as compared to the non-overlapping layout. Further analysis suggests that participants pointed towards where objects would be located in the non-overlapping layout, regardless of how much overlap was present. This suggests that, when participants are not aware that any manipulation is present, they automatically adapt their representation of the spaces based on judgments of relative size and visible constraints on the size of the whole system. 

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3. Idiosyncratic spatial scaling of biodiversity–disease relationships

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07541  

   Gilbert, Neil A; DiRenzo, Graziella V; Zipkin, Elise F (May 2025, Ecography)

   High host biodiversity is hypothesized to dilute the risk of vector‐borne diseases if many host species are ‘dead ends' that cannot effectively transmit the disease and low‐diversity areas tend to be dominated by competent host species. However, many studies on biodiversity–disease relationships characterize host biodiversity at single, local spatial scales, which complicates efforts to forecast disease risk if associations between host biodiversity and disease change with spatial scale. Here, our objective is to evaluate the spatial scaling of relationships between host biodiversity andBorrelia(the bacterial taxon which causes Lyme disease) infection prevalence in small mammals. We compared the associations between infection prevalence and small mammal host diversity for local communities (individual plots) and metacommunities (multiple plots aggregated within a landscape) sampled by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), an emerging continental‐scale environmental monitoring program with a hierarchical sampling design. We applied a multispecies, spatially‐stratified capture–recapture model to a trapping dataset to estimate five small mammal biodiversity metrics, which we used to predict infection status for a subset of trapped individuals. We found that relationships betweenBorreliainfection prevalence and biodiversity did indeed vary when biodiversity was quantified at different spatial scales but that these scaling behaviors were idiosyncratic among the five biodiversity metrics. For example, species richness of local communities showed a negative (dilution) effect on infection prevalence, while species richness of the small mammal metacommunity showed a positive (amplification) effect on infection prevalence. Our modeling approach can inform future analyses as data from similar monitoring programs accumulate and become increasingly available through time. Our results indicate that a focus on single spatial scales when assessing the influence of biodiversity on disease risk provides an incomplete picture of the complexity of disease dynamics in ecosystems. 

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4. Relationships of regeneration in Great Plains commodity agriculture

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10558-3  

   Snorek, Julie; Freidberg, Susanne; Smith, Geneva (April 2024, Agriculture and Human Values)

   In recent years regenerative agriculture has attracted growing attention as a means to improve soil health and farmer livelihoods while slowing climate change. With this attention has come increased policy support as well as the launch of private sector programs that promote regenerative agriculture as a form of carbon farming. In the United States many of these programs recruit primarily in regions where large-scale commodity production prevails, such as the Great Plains. There, a decades-old regenerative agriculture movement is growing rapidly, but not due to the incentives offered by companies’ carbon programs. On the contrary, farmers are adopting regenerative practices to cut their dependence on corporate agrochemical inputs and expertise, and to thereby achieve technology sovereignty. These practice changes often strain farmers’ existing social relationships while drawing them into new and previously neglected ones, including the more-than-human relations necessary for building soil health. These new relationships and the knowledge they generate may in turn lead farmers to think differently about their own autonomy. These findings provide insight into farmers’ skepticism of private sector carbon farming programs, and highlight the value of attention to the multiple types of relationship change that accompany and facilitate regenerative transitions. 

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5. Ecosystem-size relationships of river populations and communities

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2024.01.010  

   McIntosh, Angus R.; Greig, Hamish S.; Warburton, Helen J.; Tonkin, Jonathan D.; Febria, Catherine M. (February 2024, Trends in Ecology & Evolution)