Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Applying conservation reserve design strategies to define ecosystem monitoring priorities
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In an era of unprecedented ecological upheaval, accurately monitoring ecosystem change at large spatial scales and over long-time frames is an essential to effective environmental management and conservation. However, economic limitations often preclude revisiting entire monitoring networks at a high enough frequency to accurately detect ecological changes. Thus, a prioritisation strategy is [...]
Report of programming bugs in the DAISIE R package: consequences and correction
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
DAISIE (Dynamic Assembly of Islands through Speciation, Immigration and Extinction) is a framework for a dynamic stochastic model of island biogeography that can be used to estimate the rates of colonisation, speciation and extinction (CES rates) from phylogenetic trees of insular communities by maximum likelihood, and to simulate such data sets given a set of rates. The framework is available in [...]
Temporal Change Detection Analysis of Monroe County, NY tree cover from 2009 to 2017
Published: 2021-03-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Forests provide many ecosystem services which are enjoyed by nearby residing communities. This includes pollution and flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, food, fuel, education, recreation, and aesthetics. These ecosystem services also come from urban and suburban forests. Urban ecosystems, specifically urban green spaces services have been noted to improve human health [...]
Capitalizing on opportunistic citizen science data to monitor urban biodiversity: a multi-taxa framework
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Monitoring urban biodiversity is increasingly important, given the increasing anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity in urban areas. While the cost of broad-scale monitoring by professionals may be prohibitive, citizen science (also referred to as community science) will likely play an important role in understanding biodiversity responses to urbanization into the future. Here, we present a [...]
Deploying Ecological Countermeasures as a Biosecurity Imperative
Published: 2021-03-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology, Public Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought biosecurity to the forefront of national security policy. Land use change is a fundamental driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks, yet substantial study is yet required to unravel the mechanisms by which land use-induced spillover operates. Ecological degradation may be the 21st Century’s most overlooked security threat. Within the biosecurity context, we introduce [...]
Phyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon Concepts
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Software Engineering
Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple for a variety of post-tree analyses. To fully take advantage of this wealth of data to discover and understand large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns, computational data integration, i.e. [...]
Large-bodied birds are over-represented in unstructured citizen science data
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Citizen science platforms are quickly accumulating hundreds of millions of biodiversity observations around the world annually. Quantifying and correcting for the biases in citizen science datasets remains an important first step before these data are used to address ecological questions and monitor biodiversity. One source of potential bias among datasets is the difference between those citizen [...]
Wildlife gardening: an urban nexus of social and ecological relationships
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Biodiversity in urban environments continues to decline, alongside diminution of human connections with nature and community. An integrated ethic and practice of caring for one’s human and ecological community could help address these issues. Here, we describe how wildlife gardening can be such a pathway. We snapshot related social dynamics and human wellbeing benefits, highlighting a case study [...]
Towards monitoring ecosystem integrity within the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Signatory countries to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are formulating indicators through 2030 under the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). These goals include increasing the integrity of natural ecosystems. However, the definition of integrity and methods for measuring it remain unspecified. Moreover, nations did not achieve their 2011-2020 CBD targets, partly due to [...]
A Global Agenda for Advancing Freshwater Biodiversity Research
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Global freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and meeting the challenges of this crisis requires bold goals and the mobilization of substantial resources. While the reasons are varied, investments in both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind those in the terrestrial and marine realms. Inspired by a global consultation, we identify 15 pressing priority [...]
Fading opportunities for mitigating agriculture-environment trade-offs in a South American deforestation hotspot
Published: 2021-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Strong trade-offs between agriculture and the environment occur in deforestation frontiers, particularly in the world’s rapidly disappearing tropical and subtropical dry forests. Pathways to mitigate these trade-offs are often unclear, as well as how deforestation or different policies alter the option space of available pathways. Using a spatial optimization framework based on linear [...]
Text classification to streamline online wildlife trade analyses
Published: 2021-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Automated monitoring of websites that trade wildlife is increasingly necessary to inform conservation and biosecurity efforts. However, e-commerce and wildlife trading websites can contain a vast number of advertisements, an unknown proportion of which may be irrelevant to researchers and practitioners. Given that many of these advertisements have an unstructured text format, automated [...]
Promoting equity in scientific recommendations for high seas governance
Published: 2021-02-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In the coming months, international negotiations under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) will enter their fourth and final session to establish a legally binding agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in one of our largest global commons, areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). In this context, scientists have proposed [...]
Lessons from a century of conservation translocations
Published: 2021-02-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Translocation—moving individuals for release in different locations—is among the most important conservation interventions for increasing or re-establishing populations of threatened species. However, translocations often fail. To improve their effectiveness, we need to understand the features that distinguish successful from failed translocations. Here, we assembled and analysed a global [...]
Oases in the Sahara Desert – Linking Biological and Cultural Diversity
Published: 2021-02-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The diversity of life sensu lato comprises both biological and cultural diversity, described as “biocultural diversity”. Similar to plant and animal species, cultures and languages are threatened by extinction, too. Since drylands are pivotal systems for nature and people alike, we use oases in the Sahara Desert as model systems for examining patterns and trends of biocultural diversity. We [...]