Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Published: 2023-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Knowledge about how ecological networks vary across global scales is currently limited given the complexity of acquiring repeated data for species interactions. Yet, recent developments of metawebs highlight efficient ways to first document possible interactions within regional species pools. Downscaling metawebs towards local network predictions is a promising approach to use current data to [...]
Published: 2023-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Use Earth Observation (EO) for monitoring and re- porting on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) indicators of genetic diversity. EO has high potential and practical importance for advancing biodiversity monitoring within the GBF. We propose that these advances are artificially limited by the consensus that genetic variation cannot be observed from space. Here, we [...]
Published: 2023-08-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Quantifying biodiversity across the globe is critical for transparent reporting and assessment under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Understanding the full complexity of biodiversity requires consideration of the variation of life across genetic, species and ecosystem levels. Achieving this in a globally-standardized way remains a key international challenge for biodiversity [...]
Published: 2023-08-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Gardens hold untapped potential for participatory biodiversity conservation. Conservation gardening has recently emerged as a way to foster declining native plant species in urban and rural green spaces. But the impact of cultivating these species on population trends in the broader landscape remains underexplored. 2. Here, I study the effects of cultivating herbaceous native plants on [...]
Published: 2023-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution
Previous efforts to understand the pace of species diversification through time have disagreed over whether species diversity is unbounded or limited by a carrying capacity. Tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) have frequently been employed as a case-study in examinations of this issue, with studies of diversity being used to support both sides. Here, we examine the shape of relative abundance [...]
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences
Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, but the diversity and complexity of ecosystems makes estimating the severity of impacts and the resulting risk of collapse difficult. In this perspective, we conceptualise the challenge of understanding how climate change alters ecosystems, and how to reliably measure those changes in ecosystem risk assessments, focussing on the IUCN Red [...]
Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the context of population genetics, microsatellite markers analyzed by capillary sequencing remain useful tools for quick genotyping and low-cost studies. This contrasts with the lack of a free application to analyze chromatograms for microsatellite genotyping that is designed for population geneticists. To fill this gap, I have developed STRyper, a macOS application whose source code is [...]
Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Biodiversity is under pressure, mainly due to anthropocentric activities and climate change. At the international policy level, it is now recognised that genetic diversity is an important part of biodiversity. The availability of high-quality reference genomes gives the best basis for using genetics and genetic diversity towards the global aims of (i) protection of species, biodiversity, and [...]
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Context and objectives Although urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity erosion, it does not affect all species equally. The neutral genetic structure of populations in a given species is affected by both genetic drift and gene flow processes. In cities, the size of animal populations determines drift and can depend on multiple processes, whereas gene flow essentially depends on the [...]
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
The killing of a runner in Northern Italy by a brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) and the subsequent investigation of such matter highlighted a Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) that has been present in Trentino since the introduction of bears for conservation during the Life Ursus Project. Such conflict may be exacerbated as both human and bear populations get bigger. In this paper, I summarize the [...]
Published: 2023-07-15
Subjects: Biodiversity
Grasslands make up 40% of China’s territory and are important ecological and economic areas. The native small mammals that inhabit these grasslands are often seen as pests competing with livestock and are subjected to population control. At the same time, several species are functionally important ecosystem engineers, and their removal can have far-reaching consequences for grassland health. We [...]
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Health Policy, Inequality and Stratification, Nature and Society Relations, Public Policy, Urban Studies and Planning
Background: Through the industrial era, environmental pollution has been unevenly distributed in the environment, disproportionately impacting disenfranchised communities. The distribution of pollution is thus a question of environmental justice and public health that requires policy solutions. However, we lack robust quantitative data on pollutants for many locations and time periods because [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonization and exchange of the data remain limited, [...]
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution. However, the direction and magnitude of local plant diversity changes have not been explored thus far at a pan-Arctic scale. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular plant species from 2,174 plots at 45 study areas [...]