The progressive removal of invasive mammals from the Mercury Islands has led to over 25 years of field study designed to test the processes of restoration and natural recovery of these seabird-driven island ecosystems. Resulting from this work, four key restoration questions can now be identified as fundamental to designing island restoration programmes. The questions are: what is the regional context of the island (biogeography); how does each island ecosystem operate (ecosystem function); how have invasive species changed the ecosystem (response effects); and how can progress towards a restoration goal be defined (outcome measures)? Examples of how these questions influenced restoration in the Mercury Islands are provided with Korapuki Island as a case study. However, unpredicted and subtle responses can eventuate. In the Mercury Islands these included a hitherto unknown honeydew parasite-bird-gecko food web and subtle effects of rats on plant regeneration. Promising outcome measures of restoration progress are now being developed, including indices of marine influence using stable isotopes of nitrogen and the use of network analysis to analyse the composition of invertebrate food webs.

The global climate is changing rapidly, yet biotic responses remain uncertain. Most studies focus on changes in species ranges or plastic responses like phenology, but adaptive evolution could be equally important. Studying evolutionary responses is challenging given limited historical data and a poor understanding of genetically variable traits under selection. We take advantage of a historical dataset to test for an adaptive response to climate change in a widespread, polymorphic amphibian, the eastern red‐backed salamander Plethodon cinereus. We resurveyed color morph frequencies across New England to test for an adaptive shift in response to climate change. We modeled historical and present‐day morph proportions as a function of climate and tested the accuracy of predictions both within and across different time periods. Our models showed moderate accuracy when predicting morph frequencies within time periods, but poor accuracy across time periods. Despite substantial changes in climate and significant relationships between morph frequency and climate variables within periods, we found no evidence for the predicted shift in morph frequencies across New England. The relationship between climate and color morph frequencies is likely more complex than originally suggested, potentially involving the interplay of additional factors such as microclimate variation, land use changes, and frequency‐dependent selection. Model extrapolation and changes in the correlation structure of climate variables also likely contributed to poor predictive ability. Evolution could provide a means to moderate the effects of climate change on many species. However, we often do not understand the direct links between climate variation, traits, and fitness. Therefore, forecasting climate‐mediated evolution remains an ongoing and important challenge for understanding climate change threats to species.

The surface activity of 4 intertidal invertebrates that are preyed on by wading birds was assessed in the field during the day and at night. Nocturnal activity was greater than diurnal on each of 5 pairs of consecutive low-tide periods. The possibility of increased nocturnal activity as a predatoravoidance strategy is discussed.

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In recent decades, anthropogenic and natural disturbances have increased in rate and intensity around the world, leaving few ecosystems unaffected. As a result of the interactions among these multiple disturbances, many biological communities now occur in a degraded state as collections of fragmented ecological pieces. Restoration strategies are traditionally driven by assumptions that a community or ecosystem can be restored back to a pre‐disturbance state through ecological remediation. Yet despite our best efforts, attempts to restore fragmented communities are often unsuccessful. One explanation, the humpty‐dumpty effect, suggests that once a community is disassembled, it is difficult to reassemble it even in the presence of all the original pieces. This hypothesis, while potentially useful, often fails to incorporate the multitude of other critical mechanisms that affect our abilities to put fragmented communities back together. Here, we extend the original humpty‐dumpty analogy to incorporate eco‐evolutionary changes that can hinder successful restoration. A systematic literature review uncovered few studies that have explicitly considered how the original humpty‐dumpty effect has affected restoration success in the 30 years since its inception. Using case studies, we demonstrate how the application of our extended eco‐evolutionary humpty‐dumpty framework may determine the success of restoration actions via ecological and evolutionary changes in fragments of communities. Lastly, given continued anthropogenic disturbances and projected climatic changes, we make five recommendations to facilitate more successful restoration efforts given our revised eco‐evolutionary humpty‐dumpty effects framework. These guidelines, combined with clearly defined management goals are aimed at both keeping ecological communities as intact as possible while ensuring that future ecosystem restorations might more successfully put the ecological community pieces back together.