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The Kenya long‐term exclosure experiment (KLEE) was established in 1995 in semi‐arid savanna rangeland to examine the separate and combined effects of livestock, wildlife and megaherbivores on their shared environment. The long‐term nature of this experiment has allowed us to measure these effects and address questions of stability and resilience in the context of multiple drought‐rainy cycles. Here we outline lessons learned over the last 29 years, and how these inform a fundamental tension in long‐term studies: how to balance the need for question‐driven research with the intangible conviction that long‐term data will yield valuable findings. We highlight the value of (1) identifying experimental effects that take many years to manifest, (2) quantifying the effects of different years (including droughts) and (3) capturing the signatures of anthropogenic change. We also highlight the potential for long‐term studies to create a collaborative community of scientists that brings new questions and motivates continued long‐term study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First established in Scotland in the 1870s, civilian Scottish Pipe Bands are now a global intergenerational phenomenon. In Canada, they are a diasporic reminder of the 70,000 Scots who emigrated there in the 19th century. Currently, there are more SPBs per capita in Canada than any country outside of Scotland, with an estimated 240 civilian SPBs located from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. Because Canadian SBPs exist entirely in the community, teaching pipes and drums to beginning members of all ages--adults, teenagers, and children--is done within the confines of each local pipe band. Intertwined with how members of Canadian SPBs learn and teach music are issues of identity and meaning, both of particular importance in the Scottish-Canadian diaspora. In this, the first of a four-part qualitative multi-sited case study, we explored music teaching and learning in one Scots-Canadian Pipe Band located in rural Ontario. Research questions included: How do participants teach, learn, and perform SPB music in a Canadian context? How do Web 2.0 technologies facilitate music learning in the genre? What place does this music hold in participants' lives? What role does a "sense of community" play? How is the local situated within the global and vice versa? Finally, what practices correspond to formal school music education and what are striking differences to consider?

Herbivores alter plant biodiversity (species richness) in many of the world's ecosystems, but the magnitude and the direction of herbivore effects on biodiversity vary widely within and among ecosystems. One current theory predicts that herbivores enhance plant biodiversity at high productivity but have the opposite effect at low productivity. Yet, empirical support for the importance of site productivity as a mediator of these herbivore impacts is equivocal. Here, we synthesize data from 252 large-herbivore exclusion studies, spanning a 20-fold range in site productivity, to test an alternative hypothesis-that herbivore-induced changes in the competitive environment determine the response of plant biodiversity to herbivory irrespective of productivity. Under this hypothesis, when herbivores reduce the abundance (biomass, cover) of dominant species (for example, because the dominant plant is palatable), additional resources become available to support new species, thereby increasing biodiversity. By contrast, if herbivores promote high dominance by increasing the abundance of herbivory-resistant, unpalatable species, then resource availability for other species decreases reducing biodiversity. We show that herbivore-induced change in dominance, independent of site productivity or precipitation (a proxy for productivity), is the best predictor of herbivore effects on biodiversity in grassland and savannah sites. Given that most herbaceous ecosystems are dominated by one or a few species, altering the competitive environment via herbivores or by other means may be an effective strategy for conserving biodiversity in grasslands and savannahs globally.

Understanding the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on zoonotic disease risk is both a critical conservation objective and a public health priority. Here, we evaluate the effects of multiple forms of anthropogenic disturbance across a precipitation gradient on the abundance of pathogen-infected small mammal hosts in a multi-host, multi-pathogen system in central Kenya. Our results suggest that conversion to cropland and wildlife loss alone drive systematic increases in rodent-borne pathogen prevalence, but that pastoral conversion has no such systematic effects. The effects are most likely explained both by changes in total small mammal abundance, and by changes in relative abundance of a few high-competence species, although changes in vector assemblages may also be involved. Several pathogens responded to interactions between disturbance type and climatic conditions, suggesting the potential for synergistic effects of anthropogenic disturbance and climate change on the distribution of disease risk. Overall, these results indicate that conservation can be an effective tool for reducing abundance of rodent-borne pathogens in some contexts (e.g. wildlife loss alone); however, given the strong variation in effects across disturbance types, pathogen taxa and environmental conditions, the use of conservation as public health interventions will need to be carefully tailored to specific pathogens and human contexts.This article is part of the themed issue 'Conservation, biodiversity and infectious disease: scientific evidence and policy implications'.

Anthropogenic disturbances involving land use change, climate disruption, pollution and invasive species have been shown to impact immune function of wild animals. These immune changes have direct impacts on the fitness of impacted animals and, also, potentially indirect effects on other species and on ecological processes, notably involving the spread of infectious disease. Here, we investigate whether the selective loss of large wildlife can also drive changes in immune function of other consumer species. Using a long-standing large-scale exclosure experiment in East Africa, we investigated the effects of selective removal of large wildlife on multiple measures of immune function in the dominant small rodent in the system, the East African pouched mouse, Saccostomus mearnsi. We find support for a general increase in immune function in landscapes where large wildlife has been removed, but with some variation across immune parameters. These changes may be mediated in part by increased pathogen pressure in plots where large wildlife has been removed due to major increases in rodent density in such plots, but other factors such as changes in food resources are also likely involved. Overall, our research reveals that the elimination of large-bodied wildlife - now recognized as another major form of global anthropogenic change - may have cascading effects on immune health, with the potential for these effects to also impact disease dynamics in ecological communities. Lay Summary Functional Ecology

This study considers children's informal musicking and online music teaching, learning, playing, and invention through an analysis of children's clapping games on YouTube. We examined a body of 184 games from 103 separate YouTube postings drawn from North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Selected videos were analyzed according to video characteristics, participant attributes, purpose, and teaching and learning aspects. The results of this investigation indicated that pairs of little girls aged 3 to 12 constituted a majority of the participants in these videos, with other participant subcategories including mixed gender, teen, adult, and intergenerational examples. Seventy-one percent of the videos depicted playing episodes, and 40% were intended for pedagogical purposes; however, several categories overlapped. As of June 1, 2016, nearly 50 million individuals had viewed these YouTube postings.

In this article, the authors discuss their attempts to make antiracist multiculturalism a reality in their students' future classrooms. They note that the literature is replete with examples of what not to do in trivializing curriculum, and they attempt here to take theory into praxis/practice by exposing and describing their strategies for engaging their students in antiracist multicultural understandings and activities. (Contains 2 tables and 15 footnotes.)

In this study we consider meaningful, emancipatory, and affirming music-making in Brazil through the lens of five case studies. Each illustrates aspects of transformative theory through music-making in music education as advanced by Mezirow, Freire, and contemporary Brazilian music educators.