Academic Articles January 20th

Source: How to Create a Nature-Friendly Recovery


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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The Effectiveness of National Biodiversity Investments to Protect the Wealth of Nature

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Andrew Seidl, Kelvin Mulungu, Marco Arlaud, Onno van den Heuvel, Massimiliano Riva 
  • Finance will be among the priority concerns when the UN Convention on Biological Diversity launches the post-2020 framework for global biodiversity conservation in 2021. A sample of 30 countries facilitated the construction of a panel to better understand the effectiveness of public biodiversity investments…

Ecosystem Services and Ecological Compensation of World Heritage: A Literature Review

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Yuanyuan Xiong, Zhenzhen Zhang 
  • In recent decades, research on ecosystem services and ecological compensation has increasingly become a focal area in ecological research in the face of the degrading ecological environment. This study conducts a systematic literature review based on 115 related articles retrieved from the Web of Science database and CNKI database…

Linguistic Diversity and Conservation Opportunities at UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Africa

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): L.J. Gorenflo, Suzanne Romaine
  • Africa contains much of Earth’s biological and cultural‐linguistic diversity, but conserving this diversity faces enormous challenges amid widespread poverty, expanding development, social unrest, and rapidly growing human population. Here we examine UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites (WHSs) on continental Africa and nearby islands to gauge the potential for enlisting Indigenous peoples in their conservation…

Evaluating the social and ecological effectiveness of partially protected marine areas

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): John Turnbull, Emma Johnston, Graeme Clark
  • Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a primary tool for the stewardship, conservation, and restoration of marine ecosystems, yet 69% of global MPAs are only partially protected (i.e., are open to some form of fishing)… We assessed the social perceptions and ecological effectiveness of 18 partially protected areas and 19 fully protected areas compared with 19 open areas along 7000 km of coast of southern Australia…

Maladaptation, migration and extirpation fuel climate change risk in a forest tree species

  • Source: Nature Climate Change
  • Author(s): Andrew Gougherty, Stephen Keller, Matthew Fitzpatrick 
  • Accounting for population-level adaptation and migration remains a central challenge to predicting climate change effects on biodiversity… For the forest tree species balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), we used climate-associated genetic loci to predict population maladaptation with and without migration, the distance to sites that minimize maladaptation, and the emergence of novel genotype–climate associations…

Over half of western United States’ most abundant tree species in decline

  • Source: Nature Communications
  • Author(s): Hunter Stanke, Andrew Finley, Grant Domke, Aaron Weed, David MacFarlane 
  • Changing forest disturbance regimes and climate are driving accelerated tree mortality across temperate forests. Here, we develop a standardized forest demographic index and use it to quantify trends in tree population dynamics over the last two decades in the western United States…

Management implications of long transients in ecological systems

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Tessa Francis et al.
  • Recognizing the possibility that the state of an ecosystem may be less stable than it appears is crucial to the long-term success of management strategies in systems with long transient periods. Here we demonstrate the importance of considering the potential of transient system behaviour for management actions across a range of ecosystem organizational scales and natural system types…

Extinction risk controlled by interaction of long-term and short-term climate change

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Gregor Mathes, Jeroen van Dijk, Wolfgang Kiessling, Manuel Steinbauer 
  • Assessing extinction risk from climate drivers is a major goal of conservation science. Few studies, however, include a long-term perspective of climate change. Here we evaluate how observed genus-level extinctions… in the geological past can be predicted from the interaction of long-term temperature trends with short-term climate change…

Beyond fortress conservation: The long-term integration of natural and social science research for an inclusive conservation practice in India

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Nitin Rai et al.
  • The separation of people from their landscapes undergirds conservation action, especially in the global south. Such a ‘fortress conservation’ approach is based on the flawed idea that local people’s use of forests endangers biodiversity and therefore habitats should be protected by force if necessary. Such a conservation approach runs contrary to the recent understanding that ecosystems once perceived as ‘wilderness’ have been transformed by people…

Tracking, targeting, and conserving soil biodiversity

  • Source: Science
  • Author(s): Carlos Guerra et al.
  • Little is known about the conservation status of most soil organisms and the effects of nature conservation policies on soil systems. Yet like “canaries in the coal mine,” when soil organisms begin to disappear, ecosystems will soon start to underperform, potentially hindering their vital functions for humankind. Soil biodiversity and its ecosystem functions thus require explicit consideration when establishing nature protection priorities and policies and when designing new conservation areas…

Bottom‐up effect of eradications: The unintended consequences for top‐order predators when eradicating invasive prey

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Toby Travers, Mary‐Anne Lea, Rachael Alderman, Aleks Terauds, Justine Shaw
  • Invasive species on islands threaten global biodiversity. Monitoring programmes that complement large‐scale eradication projects and address trophic‐driven declines in predator populations and population‐level impacts of secondary poisoning are integral to ensuring bottom‐up effects of eradications are anticipated and adequately quantified…

Ecology versus society: Impacts of bark beetle infestations on biodiversity and restorativeness in protected areas of Central Europe

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Mareike Kortmann et al.
  • Protected areas worldwide are important to maintaining biodiversity and providing recreational opportunities to society. However, many protected areas are affected by unprecedented, large and severe natural disturbances, like bark beetle outbreaks…

Stream restorations with meanders increase dragonfly and damselfly diversity and abundance, including an endangered species

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): David Beaune, Yann Sellier
  • This study presents examples of successful restoration projects for biodiversity conservation. In West France, the Pinail National Nature Reserve is a protected wetland interspersed with more than 6000 ponds. This wetland is inhabited by 50 species of Odonata and thus is a key biodiversity area…

Habitat change has greater effects than climate change on butterfly occurrence in South Korea

  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s):
  • We examined the influence of climate and habitat changes on the occurrence of butterflies in South Korea, using data recorded in two different periods. Butterfly species were classified according to their distribution types to examine the effect of climate change. They were also classified according to three different habitat types to examine the effect of habitat change…  

Synergistic impacts of aggressive species on small birds in a fragmented landscape

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Martin Westgate, Mason Crane, Daniel Florance, David Lindenmayer
  • We used data from long‐term monitoring of bird populations and multivariate latent variable models to quantify how Australian woodland birds respond to the presence of the Noisy Miner. We then investigated the extent to which the presence of other aggressive species exacerbates the impacts of the Noisy Miner, and to what extent these impacts can be mitigated by dense midstorey plantings…

Lessons in ecology and conservation from a tropical forest fragment in Singapore

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Shawn Lum, Ngo Min
  • We review biodiversity and ecological studies from Bukit Timah, a tropical forest fragment in Singapore, to ask how this forest has contributed to our understanding of tropical ecology and fragmentation effects, and list the conservation values of this forest…

Changing seasonal, temporal and spatial crop-raiding trends over 15 years in a human-elephant conflict hotspot

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Lydia Tiller et al.
  • Human-wildlife conflict is increasing due to rapid natural vegetation loss and fragmentation. We investigated seasonal, temporal and spatial trends of elephant crop-raiding in the Trans Mara, Kenya during 2014–2015 and compared our results with a previous study from 1999 to 2000…

Zonally contrasting shifts of the tropical rain belt in response to climate change

  • Source: Nature Climate Change
  • Author(s): Antonios Mamalakis et al.
  • Future changes in the position of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) with climate change could affect the livelihood and food security of billions of people. Although models predict a future narrowing of the ITCZ, uncertainties remain large regarding its future position, with most past work focusing on zonal-mean shifts…

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