
Source: Ocean noise: Study to measure the oceans’ ‘year of quiet’
The latest academic papers on conservation. If you have a paper that you would like to share, please get in contact with us. Click on the title to follow the link to each article. Please note that some of these articles are behind a paywall.
Sign up for our newsletter to receive this news in your inbox.
- Source: Biological Conservation
- Author(s): Greta Schmidt, Rebecca Lewison, Hilary Swarts
- Roads negatively affect wildlife populations directly as a source of mortality and indirectly through habitat fragmentation, restricted movement, and altered habitat use. Wildlife crossing structures and roadside fencing are two common road mitigation strategies implemented to reduce wildlife road mortalities and maintain population connectivity…
Evaluating created wetlands for bird diversity and reproductive success
- Source: Biological Conservation
- Author(s): Ineta Kačergytė et al.
- Wetland creation is a common conservation practice to mitigate biodiversity loss, caused by global wetland destruction. Despite this, there is a lack of large-scale evaluations of how created wetland characteristics and landscape context relate to bird diversity and reproductive success…
- Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
- Author(s): Malena Sabatino, Adriana Rovere, Paula Meli
- Restoration of plant-pollinator interaction has emerged as a critical issue in the maintenance of resilient and healthy ecosystems. However, some challenges remain, such as integrating ecological and practical information in plant species’ choices to restore mutualistic interactions…
Bycatch reduction in the deep-water shrimp trawl fishery with a large mesh top panel
- Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
- Author(s): Kristine Cerbule et al.
- In the Northeast Atlantic deep-water shrimp trawl fishery, the bycatch of juvenile fish and shrimp represents a problem. This study evaluated if inserting a 200 mm mesh size top-panel in the last three sections of the tapered upper belly section of the trawl could reduce bycatch of juveniles…
- Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
- Author(s): A. Laguardia et al.
- Effective wildlife management requires information on population status and distribution. Survey methods that provide estimates of these population parameters can vary greatly in effort required, area covered, precision of estimates, and cost. Trade-offs are required, because increasing precision and area coverage generally requires increasing field effort and incurs a higher cost…
- Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
- Author(s): AnnMarie Blackburn, Levi Heffelfinger, Amanda Veals, Michael Tewes, John Young Jr.
- Encroaching urban development is a leading cause of habitat loss, replacing natural areas with anthropogenic infrastructure and road networks. Roadways can influence the spatial ecology and survival of mammalian carnivores, particularly felids, thereby threatening long-term persistence and conservation of sensitive species…
Ecosystem services help alleviate the intensity of dryness/wetness
- Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
- Author(s): Yu Peng et al.
- Dryness/wetness extremes are likely to become more frequent and more severe in the future in the context of climate change. Ecosystems provide multiple services, such as food production, water supply, biodiversity conservation, carbon fixation, air quality improvement, and other services. Therefore, they have the potential to mitigate the destructive effects of extreme weather events…
- Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
- Author(s): Flølo Marie et al.
- Many protected areas (PAs) have been created globally in response to the dramatic human-induced decline in biodiversity. However, not all PAs successfully preserve their biodiversity and continued monitoring is vital to assess the effectiveness of conservation efforts. Here, we repeated a study done in 2003 to assess whether investments in anti-poaching in two partially PAs (PPAs) have had quantifiable impacts on impala populations…
Evaluating the efficacy of zoning designations for national park management
- Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
- Author(s): Cheng Li et al.
- One strategy to protect endangered species, and improve the quality of habitat to meet the needs of both the wildlife and human communities that rely on large protected areas, is by zoning its management for multiple uses. We assessed whether multi-use zoning of the Giant Panda National Park could achieve the goal of protecting the panda population and its habitat, while also promoting community development…
Direct and indirect disturbance impacts in forests
- Source: Ecology Letters
- Author(s): Elle Bowd, Sam Banks, Andrew Bissett, Tom May, David Lindenmayer
- Using structural equation modelling we show that wildfires, logging and post‐fire (salvage) logging can affect plant and microbial communities and abiotic soil properties both directly and indirectly through plant‐soil‐microbial interactions in forests…
Evolutionary and environmental drivers of species richness in poeciliid fishes across the Americas
- Source: Global Ecology and Biogeography
- Author(s): Ana García‐Andrade, Juan Carvajal‐Quintero, Pablo Tedesco, Fabricio Villalobos
- Geographical gradients of vertebrate species richness are determined jointly by evolutionary and environmental factors. Support for these factors comes mostly from tetrapods and, recently, marine fishes, but their validity and relative importance in freshwater fishes is not well understood…
- Source: Ecology Letters
- Author(s): Shinichi Tatsumi, Ryosuke Iritani, Marc Cadotte
- The last two decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in beta diversity (spatial variation in species composition) from local to global scales. Here, we develop a novel numerical method to additively partition the temporal changes in beta diversity into components that reflect local extinctions and colonisations…
- Source: Global Ecology and Biogeography
- Author(s): M. Anas, Nicholas Mandrak
- A better understanding of native and non‐native species responses to environmental conditions, historical processes, and human pressures is crucial in the face of global environmental changes affecting biodiversity. Here, we evaluate the relative roles of environmental, historical and anthropogenic factors in influencing species richness of native and non‐native freshwater fishes…
Freshwater salinization syndrome: from emerging global problem to managing risks
- Source: Biogeochemistry
- Author(s): Sujay Kaushal
- Freshwater salinization is an emerging global problem impacting safe drinking water, ecosystem health and biodiversity, infrastructure corrosion, and food production… Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of salinization issues (past, present, and future), and we investigate drivers and solutions…
Mature Andean forests as globally important carbon sinks and future carbon refuges
- Source: Nature Communications
- Author(s): Alvaro Duque et al.
- It is largely unknown how South America’s Andean forests affect the global carbon cycle, and thus regulate climate change. Here, we measure aboveground carbon dynamics over the past two decades in 119 monitoring plots spanning a range of >3000 m elevation across the subtropical and tropical Andes…
- Source: Conservation Biology
- Author(s): Thalassa Hamilton et al.
- Despite decades of calls to rectify cultural imbalance in conservation, threatened species management still relies overwhelmingly on ideas from Western science and on top‐down implementation. Values‐based approaches to decision making can be used to integrate indigenous peoples’ values into species conservation in a more meaningful way…
Near‐term ecological forecasting for dynamic aeroconservation of migratory birds
- Source: Conservation Biology
- Author(s): Kyle Horton, Benjamin Van Doren, Heidi Albers, Andrew Farnsworth, Daniel Sheldon
- Near‐term ecological forecasting has potential to mitigate the negative impacts of human modifications on wildlife by directing efficient dynamic conservation action through relevant and timely predictions. We use the North American avian migration system to highlight ecological forecasting applications for aeroconservation…
Opportunities to improve China’s biodiversity protection laws
- Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
- Author(s): Xiushan Li et al.
- Since 1989, China has established a system of powerful laws and regulations aimed to preserve its rich natural flora and fauna. However, this legislative framework still has shortcomings, in terms of sentencing standards across related crimes and the extent of scientific basis for sentences…
Global warming is causing a more pronounced dip in marine species richness around the equator
- Source: PNAS
- Author(s): Chhaya Chaudhary, Anthony Richardson, David Schoeman, Mark Costello
- The latitudinal gradient in species richness, with more species in the tropics and richness declining with latitude, is widely known and has been assumed to be stable over recent centuries. We analyzed data on 48,661 marine animal species since 1955, accounting for sampling variation, to assess whether the global latitudinal gradient in species richness is being impacted by climate change…
Don’t move a mussel? Parasite and disease risk in conservation action
- Source: Conservation Letters
- Author(s): Joshua Brian, Isobel Ollard, David Aldridge
- Conservationists increasingly employ translocation or captive breeding procedures to support ailing populations, and the ecosystem engineering capabilities of mussels are being increasingly harnessed in bioremediation projects. However, there is little consideration of the risk of pathogen transmission when moving mussels from hatcheries or wild donor populations into new habitats…