Invertebrates are dominant species in primary tropical rainforests, where their abundance and diversity contributes to the functioning and resilience of these globally important ecosystems. However, more than one-third of tropical forests have been logged, with dramatic impacts on rainforest biodiversity that may disrupt key ecosystem processes. We find that the contribution of invertebrates to three ecosystem processes operating at three trophic levels (litter decomposition, seed predation and removal, and invertebrate predation) is reduced by up to one-half following logging. These changes are associated with decreased abundance of key functional groups of termites, ants, beetles and earthworms, and an increase in the abundance of small mammals, amphibians and insectivorous birds in logged relative to primary forest. Our results suggest that ecosystem processes themselves have considerable resilience to logging, but the consistent decline of invertebrate functional importance is indicative of a human-induced shift in how these ecological processes operate in tropical rainforests.

In this work, plasmonically heated solid-state gold nanoparticle (AuNP) arrays are investigated under novel conditions that include large (>35°C) steady-state (SS) temperature increases (∆T) dominated by conduction in open environments that allow vapor-liquid phase change. Evaporative cooling from the open system decreases SS ∆T of the system by as much as (11.6 ( 0.33)°C (45%), consistent with predictions from an energy balance model expanded in this work to account for evaporative cooling and associated decreasing thermal mass. Comparing dynamic and steady temperature profiles from water evaporating from a AuNPcoated Si cell at 50 mW laser irradiation with the model yielded an average accumulated residual sum of squares of 2.95°C 2 over 200 s. Temperature increases that distribute nonuniformly across sample cell surfaces due to high laser power (e150 mW) and conductive heat transfer are accurately and uniformly (<0.7% difference) represented by an infinite fin model at laser powers from 50 to 150 mW, resulting in R 2 values near unity. Overall heat transfer coefficients for air cells estimated from both dynamic and steady-state models agree within 2.05 to 11.45%. This model independence allows predicting temporal evolution or steady-state distribution of temperatures from just two measured values. The improved models and increased understanding of these systems will play an important role in implementing plasmonically heated structures in sustainable energy applications, biomedical applications and many others.

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Understanding how community assembly processes drive biodiversity patterns is a central goal of community ecology. While it is generally accepted that ecological communities are assembled by both stochastic and deterministic processes, quantifying their relative importance remains challenging. Even fewer studies have investigated how the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic community assembly processes vary among taxa and along gradients of habitat degradation. Using data on 1,002 invertebrate species across six taxonomic groups in Malaysian Borneo, we quantified the importance of stochastic and deterministic community assembly processes across a gradient of logging intensity. Dispersal limitation was the dominant process at all levels of logging intensity. The relationship between logging and community assembly varied depending on the specific combination of taxa and stochasticity metric used, but, in general, the processes that govern invertebrate community assembly were remarkably robust to changes in land use intensity.