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Phenotypic plasticity facilitates species persistence across resource gradients but may be limited in low-resource environments requiring resource conservation. We investigated the tradeoff between trait plasticity and resource conservatism across a biome boundary characterized by high turnover in nutrient and light availability, and whether this contributes to the maintenance of alternative stable states. Differences in plasticity were determined by comparing species’ leaf and foliar nutritional trait responses to light, represented by leaf area index (LAI), and soil nutrient availability across forest–shrubland boundaries in South Africa. Although forest had higher LAI and soil nutrient availability than shrubland, forest species experienced greater resource variation. With increasing LAI and nutrient availability, forest species increased their leaf size, specific leaf area and leaf area/stem length, and decreased their foliar [N] and [K]. Although these responses are indicative of plasticity, shrubland species appeared to lack plasticity as evidenced by limited trait variation with environmental heterogeneity. Inhabiting diverse light environments imposed by forests probably selects for plasticity, whereas light-saturated, fire-prone, nutrient-poor environments that select for conservative leaf traits and below-ground investments compromise plasticity in shrubland species. This pattern suggests a tradeoff between trait plasticity and resource conservatism, which may support the stability of alternative vegetation states.

• Growth plasticity may allow fire-prone species to maximize their recovery rates during temporary, sporadic periods of rainfall availability in the post-fire environment. However, moisture- driven growth plasticity could be maladaptive in nutrient-limited environments that require tighter control of growth and resource use. We investigated whether a trade-off between plasticity and conservatism mediates growth responses to altered rainfall seasonality in neighbouring shrubland communities that occupy different soils. • We monitored post-fire vegetation regrowth in two structurally similar, Mediterranean-type shrublands for 3 years. We investigated the effects of experimentally altered rainfall seasonality on post-fire species’ growth rates. • We found that moisture-driven growth plasticity was higher among species occupying the fertile soils of the renosterveld site relative to those occupying the nutrient-poor soils of the fynbos site. This resulted in higher overall responsiveness of post-fire recovery patterns in renosterveld to experimental shifts in rainfall seasonality. • In post-fire shrubland communities, the trade-off between moisture-dependent growth plasticity and resource conservatism could be mediated by soil nutrient availability. Therefore, edaphic differences between structurally similar shrublands could lead to differences in their sensitivity to post-fire rainfall seasonality.

Although the number of direct Ebola-related deaths from the 2013 to 2016 West African Ebola outbreak has been quantified, the number of indirect deaths, resulting from decreased utilization of routine health services, remains unknown. Such information is a key ingredient of health system resilience, essential for adequate allocation of resources to both ‘crisis response activities’ and ‘core functions’. Taking stock of indirect deaths may also help the concept of health system resilience achieve political traction over the traditional approach of disease-specific surveillance. This study responds to these imperatives by quantifying the extent of the drop in utilization of essential reproductive, maternal and neonatal health services in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak by using interrupted time-series regression to analyse Health Management Information System (HMIS) data. Using the Lives Saved Tool, we then model the implication of this decrease in utilization in terms of excess maternal and neonatal deaths, as well as stillbirths. We find that antenatal care coverage suffered from the largest decrease in coverage as a result of the Ebola epidemic, with an estimated 22 percentage point (p.p.) decrease in population coverage compared with the most conservative counterfactual scenario. Use of family planning, facility delivery and post-natal care services also decreased but to a lesser extent (-6, -8 and -13 p.p. respectively). This decrease in utilization of life-saving health services translates to 3600 additional maternal, neonatal and stillbirth deaths in the year 2014–15 under the most conservative scenario. In other words, we estimate that the indirect mortality effects of a crisis in the context of a health system lacking resilience may be as important as the direct mortality effects of the crisis itself.

Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.

Nutrient allocation is an important aspect of plant resource uptake and use, which is related to life‐history strategies. Although to date considerable attention has focused on plant allocation of nitrogen and phosphorus, comparatively little information is available on the allocation of various other nutrients and their up‐scaling from the species to community level. We measured 10 nutrient elements in the leaves, branches and fine roots of 551 plant species growing in eight forest ecosystems in China, ranging from cold temperate to subtropical forests. We estimated the scaling relationship of multiple nutrients among plant organs at the species level and scaled‐up the relationship to the community level by combining this information with that of community structure. Nutrient allocation among plant organs was conserved in different functional groups and biomes across broad environmental gradients. Nutrient partitioning between organs with similar function tended to be isometric, whereas partitioning between organs with distinct functions tended to be allometric. The scaling relationship between above‐ and below‐ground organs remained consistent, whereas the scaling relationship within above‐ground organs changed after scaling up from the species to the community level, with the relative change in nutrients being consistently smaller in the more active organs. Synthesis. The pattern of multiple nutrient allocation among organs showed a degree of conservatism across plant functional groups and biomes, with disproportional changes in nutrient content between functionally distinct organs and a lower relative change in more active organs. This conservative strategy implies the existence of general rules that constrain plant nutrient allocation. In this study, we demonstrated the conservative allocation strategy for multiple nutrients among different plant organs under the framework of scaling relationship and stoichiometric homeostasis. This strategy can be divided along three dimensions. First, the partitioning of multiple nutrients among plant organs shows a degree of conservatism across different plant functional groups and biomes. Second, nutrient partitioning between organs with similar function tends to be isometric, whereas that between organs with distinct functions tends to be allometric. Third, the more active an organ, the less its nutrient contents change.

Many animals are active only during a particular time (e.g., day vs. night), a partitioning that may have important consequences for species coexistence. An open question is the extent to which this diel activity niche is evolutionarily conserved or labile. Here, we analyze diel activity data across a phylogeny of 1914 tetrapod species. We find strong phylogenetic signal, showing that closely related species tend to share similar activity patterns. Ancestral reconstructions show that nocturnality was the most likely ancestral diel activity pattern for tetrapods and many major clades within it (e.g., amphibians, mammals). Remarkably, nocturnal activity appears to have been maintained continuously in some lineages for ~350 million years. Thus, we show that traits involved in local-scale resource partitioning can be conserved over strikingly deep evolutionary time scales. We also demonstrate a potentially important (but often overlooked) metric of niche conservatism. Finally, we show that diurnal lineages appear to have faster speciation and diversification rates than nocturnal lineages, which may explain why there are presently more diurnal tetrapod species even though diurnality appears to have evolved more recently. Overall, our results may have implications for studies of community ecology, species richness, and the evolution of diet and communication systems.

Americans' attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We conducted five studies to examine this issue. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that liberals, but not conservatives, view the environment in moral terms and that this tendency partially explains the relation between political ideology and environmental attitudes. Content analyses of newspaper op-eds (Study 2a) and public-service announcements (Study 2b) found that contemporary environmental discourse is based largely on moral concerns related to harm and care, which are more deeply held by liberals than by conservatives. However, we found that reframing proenvironmental rhetoric in terms of purity, a moral value resonating primarily among conservatives, largely eliminated the difference between liberals' and conservatives' environmental attitudes (Study 3). These results establish the importance of moralization as a cause of polarization on environmental attitudes and suggest that reframing environmental discourse in different moral terms can reduce the gap between liberals and conservatives in environmental concern.

1. Phylogenetic and species-based taxonomic descriptions of community structure may provide complementary information about the mechanisms driving community assembly across different environments. Environmental filtering may have similar effects on taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity under the assumption of niche conservatism, whereas competitive exclusion could produce contrasting patterns in these diversity metrics. In grassland restorations, these diversity patterns might then reveal potential assembly mechanisms underlying the impacts of restoration and management conditions on community structure. 2. We compared plant community structure (alpha diversity, composition, and within-site beta diversity) from both phylogenetic and taxonomic perspectives. Using surveys from 120 tallgrass prairie restorations in four regions of the Midwestern United States, we examined the effects of four potential drivers or environmental gradients: precipitation in the first year of restoration, seed mix richness, time since last prescribed fire, and restoration age, and included soil conditions as a covariate. 3. First-year precipitation influenced taxonomic community structure, but had weak effects on phylogenetic diversity and composition. Similarly, greater seed mix richness increased taxonomic diversity but did not influence phylogenetic diversity. Taxonomic, but not phylogenetic, diversity generally was lower in older restorations and those with a longer time since the last prescribed fire. These drivers consistently explained more variation in taxonomic than phylogenetic diversity and composition, perhaps in part because species turnover was largely among related species, producing weak impacts on phylogenetic community measures. 4. An impact of precipitation on taxonomic but not phylogenetic diversity suggests that there may not be large differences in drought tolerance among clades that would cause phylogenetic patterns to arise from this environmental filter. Declining taxonomic diversity but not phylogenetic diversity is consistent with competitive exclusion as an assembly mechanism when competition is strongest between related species. 5. Synthesis. This research shows how studying taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of ecosystem restorations can inform plant community ecology and help natural resource managers better predict the outcomes of restoration actions and management.

Prejudiced attitudes and political nationalism vary widely around the world, but there has been little research on what predicts this variation. Here we examine the ecological and cultural factors underlying the worldwide distribution of prejudice. We suggest that cultures grow more prejudiced when they tighten cultural norms in response to destabilizing ecological threats. A set of seven archival analyses, surveys, and experiments (∑N = 3,986,402) find that nations, American states, and pre-industrial societies with tighter cultural norms show the most prejudice based on skin color, religion, nationality, and sexuality, and that tightness predicts why prejudice is often highest in areas of the world with histories of ecological threat. People's support for cultural tightness also mediates the link between perceived ecological threat and intentions to vote for nationalist politicians. Results replicate when controlling for economic development, inequality, conservatism, residential mobility, and shared cultural heritage. These findings offer a cultural evolutionary perspective on prejudice, with implications for immigration, intercultural conflict, and radicalization.