413 papers
This study introduces a framework to quantify climate change exposure for 60 Fraser River salmon and steelhead Conservation Units, revealing that lake-type sockeye and Chinook salmon face the highest risks due to elevated stream temperatures and specific life-stage thermal sensitivities.
By analyzing long-term river data from New Zealand, this study demonstrates that fast, slow, and seasonal flow fluctuations differentially impact macroinvertebrate communities, with slow variations showing the strongest trait-mediated responses and flood events causing pervasive negative effects, thereby highlighting the necessity of considering multiple temporal scales and functional traits to predict community dynamics.
While species-specific qPCR initially demonstrated slightly higher detection sensitivity for the critically endangered European eel, this study concludes that eDNA metabarcoding is the superior monitoring tool because its marginally lower initial sensitivity is outweighed by the ability to detect the species with minimal additional sampling effort while simultaneously providing comprehensive biodiversity data essential for holistic conservation.
Contrary to the expectation that plant presence would enhance decomposition through exudates, this study demonstrates that winter wheat actually slows decomposition rates due to resource competition with soil microbes, a process driven more by fungal activity and soil humidity than by bacteria or temperature.
This paper introduces the Species Association Index (SAI), an occupancy-standardized metric derived from the co-occurrence-occupancy curve, to quantify and compare species' tendencies to associate with others across different communities while accounting for their overall frequency of occurrence.
Analysis of 25 City Nature Challenge events in the UK (2020–2025) demonstrates that these bioblitzes significantly enhance urban biodiversity knowledge and public engagement by doubling recording participation, documenting previously unrecorded species, and reducing data biases through increased use of urban blue-green spaces.
This study evaluates airborne imaging spectroscopy for tree species classification using controlled biodiversity experiments in Germany, finding that while the method achieves high accuracy for up to four species, its effectiveness declines in more diverse plots, suggesting it may be better suited for monitoring functional diversity rather than distinguishing numerous individual species.
By employing an efficient sequential sampling algorithm to apply a niche-neutral model to bird occurrence patterns in the Riau archipelago, the study demonstrates that while the model's baseline assumptions fail to explain observed segregation and nestedness, incorporating inter-island heterogeneity in niche diversity and immigration rates successfully diagnoses the underlying mechanisms structuring these communities.
This study on free-ranging proboscis monkeys in Malaysian Borneo reveals that while group type does not significantly influence parasite abundance, group size and habitat disturbance levels differentially affect the prevalence of specific intestinal parasites, highlighting the complex interplay between social structure and environmental factors in shaping infection dynamics.
This study utilizes a simulation model to demonstrate that while the timing of ice-scour events has minor short-term effects on Antarctic bryozoan assemblages, an extended growing season accelerates long-term succession and the frequency of predation events significantly influences recovery rates and overall abundance, highlighting the critical need to consider the interplay between biotic interactions and changing physical disturbance regimes when forecasting climate change impacts.
This study demonstrates that increasing spatial approximation complexity in distribution models does not necessarily improve prediction quality and can actually degrade predictive performance by producing poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates, thereby highlighting the need for practitioners to carefully select appropriate mesh resolution rather than assuming higher complexity always yields better results.
This study proposes and applies a novel decomposition of the net biodiversity effect to disentangle how plant diversity influences ecosystem functioning through two distinct pathways: total community biomass and the expression of effect traits, revealing that these mechanisms can exert contrasting or opposing impacts on specific functions like nitrogen retention, soil hydraulic conductivity, and forage digestibility.
While broadleaved hedgerows in pine plantation landscapes support higher abundance of the generalist *Apodemus sylvaticus* compared to plantation edges, they fail to restore forest-specialist small mammal communities or increase overall species richness, indicating that such edge-based interventions alone are insufficient to counteract the biodiversity limitations of intensively managed plantations.
This paper proposes an eco-evolutionary framework that defines distinct global wildfire regimes based on the seasonal timing and magnitude of fuel availability (GPP) and drying (VPD), demonstrating that while vegetation and human activities modify fire properties, these environmental drivers fundamentally constrain fire behavior and offer a basis for simplified Earth System modeling.
By analyzing Chinese anurans, this study demonstrates that relying solely on adult traits to assess extinction risk is insufficient, as larval stage characteristics also significantly influence vulnerability, necessitating a whole-life-history perspective for effective conservation.
This paper proposes "loop tracing" as a method to dissect the feedback mechanisms driving complex instabilities in resource-host-parasite systems, demonstrating how direct positive effects of resources on propagule production and transmission catalyze oscillations, Allee thresholds, and chaotic dynamics.
This paper presents a novel, cost-effective machine learning approach that classifies bird species by analyzing their distinct flight patterns, offering a scalable alternative to expensive visual monitoring systems despite achieving moderate classification accuracy in a proof-of-concept study involving four species.
This study analyzes 11 years of California steelhead angler data to reveal that the fishery exhibits extreme catch inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.81) driven largely by zero-catch anglers, while also establishing a methodological framework for determining the minimum sample sizes needed for robust inequality estimation in recreational fisheries management.
The paper introduces NeMO, a flexible R package that utilizes Bayesian multi-species occupancy models to address detection uncertainty in eDNA metabarcoding by accounting for nested sampling structures, estimating key detection parameters, and optimizing survey design for effective biodiversity monitoring.
This global synthesis of over 30,000 species reveals that while most organisms avoid urban environments, the relationship between body size and urban affinity is highly heterogeneous across taxa, with larger plants generally thriving in cities while animals show variable responses, underscoring the need for tailored strategies to support urban biodiversity.