Mast‐fruiting trees represent a pulsed resource that both supports and destabilizes consumer populations. Whereas a reliable resource is abundant on average and with limited variation in time and space, masting is volatile and localized, and that variability ramifies throughout food‐webs. Theory is developed to evaluate how the space–time structure of masting interacts with consumers who exploit alternative hosts, forage widely in space, and store reserves in time. We derive the space–time–species covariance in resource supply and combine it with the space–time–diet breadth of consumers, or ambit. Direct connection to data is made possible with Mast Inference and Forecasting (MASTIF), a state‐space autoregressive model that fits seed‐trap and canopy observations and predicts resource availability within the canopy and on the forest floor with full uncertainty. A resource score can be assigned to each consumer–habitat combination that integrates the benefits of a high mean supply weighed against the variance cost. As the consumer ambit increases, the volatility of an unreliable resource shifts from a variance cost to a mean benefit. Consumers foraging in the canopy (arboreal arthropods and rodents, song birds) experience space‐time covariance between host trees. Consumers on the forest floor (seed and damping‐off fungi, arthropods, rodents, ground‐nesting birds, mammals) experience instead a redistribution of that covariance by dispersal. For consumers lacking mobility, demographic storage in the form of episodic birth cohorts following mast years is important for population persistence. Consumers additionally compensate volatility with diet breadth. Depending on the dominant masting strategies of host tree species in the diet, habitats differentially limit consumers depending on the misalignment between consumer ambit and spatiotemporal covariance of hosts. The impact of adding or subtracting a diet item can be gauged with the standard error (SE) rule or the benefit of an added diet item balanced against the variance cost, both of which depend on the existing diet, the abundance of the new host, and the consumer's foraging ambit. Results rank habitats by their capacities to support wildlife and other consumers from a resource perspective. Results are connected directly to data, with full uncertainty, by MASTIF.

Indirect climate effects on tree fecundity that come through variation in size and growth (climate-condition interactions) are not currently part of models used to predict future forests. Trends in species abundances predicted from meta-analyses and species distribution models will be misleading if they depend on the conditions of individuals. Here we find from a synthesis of tree species in North America that climate-condition interactions dominate responses through two pathways, i) effects of growth that depend on climate, and ii) effects of climate that depend on tree size. Because tree fecundity first increases and then declines with size, climate change that stimulates growth promotes a shift of small trees to more fecund sizes, but the opposite can be true for large sizes. Change the depresses growth also affects fecundity. We find a biogeographic divide, with these interactions reducing fecundity in the West and increasing it in the East. Continental-scale responses of these forests are thus driven largely by indirect effects, recommending management for climate change that considers multiple demographic rates.

Poaching is rapidly extirpating African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) from most of their historical range, leaving vast areas of elephant-free tropical forest. Elephants are ecological engineers that create and maintain forest habitat; thus, their loss will have large consequences for the composition and structure of Afrotropical forests. Through a comprehensive literature review, we evaluated the roles of forest elephants in seed dispersal, nutrient recycling, and herbivory and physical damage to predict the cascading ecological effects of their population declines. Loss of seed dispersal by elephants will favor tree species dispersed abiotically and by smaller dispersal agents, and tree species composition will depend on the downstream effects of changes in elephant nutrient cycling and browsing. Loss of trampling and herbivory of seedlings and saplings will result in high tree density with release from browsing pressures. Diminished seed dispersal by elephants and high stem density are likely to reduce the recruitment of large trees and thus increase homogeneity of forest structure and decrease carbon stocks. The loss of ecological services by forest elephants likely means Central African forests will be more like Neotropical forests, from which megafauna were extirpated thousands of years ago. Without intervention, as much as 96% of Central African forests will have modified species composition and structure as elephants are compressed into remaining protected areas. Stopping elephant poaching is an urgent first step to mitigating these effects, but long-term conservation will require land-use planning that incorporates elephant habitat into forested landscapes that are being rapidly transformed by industrial agriculture and logging.

Despite its importance for forest regeneration, food webs, and human economies, changes in tree fecundity with tree size and age remain largely unknown. The allometric increase with tree diameter assumed in ecological models would substantially overestimate seed contributions from large trees if fecundity eventually declines with size. Current estimates are dominated by overrepresentation of small trees in regression models. We combined global fecundity data, including a substantial representation of large trees. We compared size–fecundity relationships against traditional allometric scaling with diameter and two models based on crown architecture. All allometric models fail to describe the declining rate of increase in fecundity with diameter found for 80% of 597 species in our analysis. The strong evidence of declining fecundity, beyond what can be explained by crown architectural change, is consistent with physiological decline. A downward revision of projected fecundity of large trees can improve the next generation of forest dynamic models.

Female mammals often begin to reproduce before achieving somatic maturity and therefore face tradeoffs between allocating energy to reproduction or their own continued development. Constraints on primiparous females are associated with greater reproductive failure, and first-born infants often have slower growth and greater mortality and morbidity than infants born to multiparous females. Effects of early life investment may persist even after weaning when juveniles are no longer dependent on maternal care and mother’s milk. We investigated the long-term consequences of birth order in a large sample of rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, assigned to the outdoor breeding colony at the California National Primate Research Center (N=2724). A joint model for growth and mortality over the first three years of life allowed us to explicitly connect growth rates to survival. As expected, males are born heavier and grow faster relative to females. However, contrary to expectations, later-born males face substantially lower survival probability during their first three years, whereas first-born males survive at greater rates similar to both first-born and later-born females. Primiparous mothers are less likely to conceive during the subsequent breeding season, suggesting that their reproductive costs are greater than those of multiparous mothers. We speculate that compensatory tactics, both behavioral and physiological, of first-born offspring and their mothers, as well as the novel ecology of the captive environment, underlie these findings. The results presented here provide new insights into how maternal and infant life history tradeoffs may influence developmental trajectories even after the period of maternal dependence.