Academic Articles Feb. 3

Source: Native Species or Invasive? The Distinction Blurs as the World Warms

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.

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• Climate change mitigation and nature conservation both require higher protected area targets
  • Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
  • Author(s): CM Roberts, BC O’Leary, JP Hawkins 
  • Nations of the world have, to date, pursued nature protection and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies separately. Both efforts have failed to achieve the scale of action needed to halt biodiversity loss or mitigate climate change. We argue …

• How can we mitigate against increasing biophobia among children during the extinction of experience?
  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Masashi Soga et al. 
  • The ‘extinction of experience’ – the loss of direct interactions between people and nature – has the potential to increase negative attitudes towards nature (‘biophobia’).

• Effectiveness of private land conservation areas in maintaining natural land cover and biodiversity intactness
  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s): Tafadzwa Shumba et al.
  • Private land conservation areas (PLCAs) are increasingly looked to for meeting the deficit left by state-owned protected areas in reaching global conservation targets. 

• Choice of baseline affects historical population trends in hunted mammals of North America
  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Amy C. Collins, Monika Böhm, Ben Collen
  • Establishing historical baselines of species’ populations is important for contextualising present-day population trends, identifying significant anthropogenic threats, and preventing a cultural phenomenon known as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’.

• Foundation species promote community stability by increasing diversity in a giant kelp forest
  • Source: Ecology
  • Author(s): Thomas Lamy et al.
  • Foundation species structure communities, promote biodiversity and stabilize ecosystem processes by creating locally stable environmental conditions. Despite their critical importance, the role of foundation species in stabilizing natural communities has seldom been quantified.

• Anthropogenic impact on the atmospheric microbiome
  • Source: Nature Microbiology
  • Author(s): Stephen D. J. Archer, Stephen B. Pointing 
  • The atmosphere has undergone extensive physico-chemical change due to anthropogenic emissions. The impact on the ecology of the atmospheric microbiome has so far not been considered. Here, we define the scope of change to the atmosphere and identify potential microbial responses.

• Climatic and local stressor interactions threaten tropical forests and coral reefs
  • Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
  • Author(s): Filipe M. França et al.
  • A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows. The study mapped over 100 locations where tropical forests and coral reefs have been affected by climate extremes…

• Large-scale assessment of genetic diversity and population connectivity of Amazonian jaguars (Panthera onca) provides a baseline for their conservation and monitoring in fragmented landscapes
  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Gustavo Lorenzana et al.
  • Jaguar population genetics has so far not been investigated on a broad scale in the Amazon rainforest, which constitutes the largest remaining block of continuous habitat for the species. Given its size, it serves not only as a stronghold but also as a reference for jaguar conservation genetics, against which fragmented landscapes can be compared. 

• The diverse motivations of citizen scientists: Does conservation emphasis grow as volunteer participation progresses?
  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Lincoln R. Larson et al.
  • Citizen science has proven to be a valuable tool for biodiversity conservation. However, to maximize the conservation benefits of citizen science programs, researchers and practitioners would gain from a better understanding of project volunteers and what drives them to participate. 

• Success and failure of ecological management is highly variable in an experimental test
  • Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • Author(s): Easton R. White, Kyle Cox, Brett A. Melbourne, Alan Hastings
  • What do we really know about reasons attributed to the success or failure of wildlife management efforts? A new study suggests a disquieting answer: much less than we think. A new study finds that ecological systems might contain a lot of inherent randomness that makes them difficult to manage.

• Recent divergence in the contributions of tropical and boreal forests to the terrestrial carbon sink
  • Source: Nature Ecology and Evolution
  • Author(s): Torbern Tagesson et al. 
  • An international study shows that the rapid increase in land use in the world’s tropical areas is affecting the global carbon cycle more than was previously known. By studying data from a new satellite imaging system, the researchers also found that the biomass in tropical forests is decreasing.

• Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches?
  • Source: Global Ecology and Biogeography
  • Author(s): Lenore Fahrig
  • The principle that a single large habitat patch should hold more species than several small patches totalling the same area (SL > SS) is used by conservation agencies to favour protection of large, contiguous areas. Previous reviews of empirical studies have found the opposite,…

• Planning for climate change through additions to a national protected area network: implications for cost and configuration
  • Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
  • Author(s): Joshua J. Lawler et al.
  • Expanding the network of protected areas is a core strategy for conserving biodiversity in the face of climate change.

• Complexity revealed in the greening of the Arctic
  • Source: Nature Climate Change
  • Author(s): Isla H. Myers-Smith, Jeffrey T. Kerby, Sonja Wipf
  • As the Arctic warms, vegetation is responding, and satellite measures indicate widespread greening at high latitudes. This ‘greening of the Arctic’ is among the world’s most important large-scale ecological responses to global climate change

• On the functional relationship between biodiversity and economic value
  • Source: Science Advances
  • Author(s): Carola Paul et al.
  • A group of researchers under the direction of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are studying the economic benefits that farmers and foresters can obtain by focusing on several species instead of just one. The benefits that biodiversity brings to society are also being studied in an extensive literature review.