Academic Articles March 31

Source: Climate change: Consumer pose ‘growing threat’ to tropical forests


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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Reducing anthropogenic subsidies can curb density of overabundant predators in protected areas

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Kristin Brunk, Elena West, M. Peery, Anna Pidgeon
  • Protected areas safeguard biodiversity and provide opportunities for human recreation. However, abundant anthropogenic food subsidies associated with human activities in protected areas can lead to high densities of generalist predators, posing a threat to rare species at broad spatial scales…

Birds seen and not seen during the COVID-19 pandemic: The impact of lockdown measures on citizen science bird observations

  • Source: Biological Conservation 
  • Author(s): Marco Basile, Luca Russo, Valerio Russo, Andrea Senese, Nicola Bernardo
  • We investigated how stay-at-home orders affected data submitted by birdwatchers in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) to a widely-used citizen science platform, iNaturalist, depending on whether observations were collected in urban or non-urban areas. We found significant trends in the daily number of observations…

Drivers of local extinction risk in alpine plants under warming climate

  • Source: Ecology Letters
  • Author(s): Hanna Nomoto, Jake Alexander
  • Relatively few local plant extinctions have been documented as a result of recent climate change. We used a whole‐community transplant experiment to disentangle the contribution of warming and novel low elevation species to the local extinction risk of four alpine plants in the Swiss Alps…

Increasing temperature threatens an already endangered coastal dune plant

  • Source: Ecosphere
  • Author(s): Aldo Compagnoni, Eleanor Pardini, Tiffany Knight
  • Climate change has the potential to reduce the abundance and distribution of species and threaten global biodiversity, but it is typically not listed as a threat in classifying species conservation status… Moreover, the threat from climate change is often studied in specific biomes, such as polar or arid ones. Other biomes, such as coastal ones, have received little attention…

Risk of pesticide pollution at the global scale

  • Source: Nature Geoscience
  • Author(s): Fiona Tang, Manfred Lenzen, Alexander McBratney, Federico Maggi 
  • Pesticides are widely used to protect food production and meet global food demand but are also ubiquitous environmental pollutants, causing adverse effects on water quality, biodiversity and human health. We find that 64% of global agricultural land is at risk of pesticide pollution by more than one more than one active ingredient, and 31% is at high risk…

Erosion of global functional diversity across the tree of life

  • Source: Science Advances
  • Author(s): Carlos P. Carmona et al.
  • Although one-quarter of plant and vertebrate species are threatened with extinction, little is known about the potential effect of extinctions on the global diversity of ecological strategies. Using trait and phylogenetic information for more than 75,000 species of vascular plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and freshwater fish, we characterized the global functional spectra of each of these groups. Mapping extinction risk within these spectra showed that larger species with slower pace of life are universally threatened…

Mapping the deforestation footprint of nations reveals growing threat to tropical forests

  • Source: Nature Ecology & Evolution
  • Author(s): Nguyen Tien Hoang, Keiichiro Kanemoto 
  • Deforestation, a significant threat to biodiversity, is accelerated by global demand for commodities. Although prior literature has linked deforestation to global supply chains, here we provide a fine-scale representation of spatial patterns of deforestation associated with international trade…

A large scale analysis of threats to the nesting sites of Podocnemis species and the effectiveness of the coverage of these areas by the Brazilian Action Plan for Amazon Turtle Conservation

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Camila Fagundes et al.
  • We evaluated the vulnerability of nesting sites (sandbanks) available to Podocnemis expansa, P. unifilis and P. sextuberculata to human threats and the coverage of these areas by a public policy created to conserve turtles. Species distribution models were used to identify potential nesting areas…

COVID-19 pandemic impacts on conservation research, management, and public engagement in US national parks

  • Source: Biological Conservation
  • Author(s): Abraham Miller-Rushing et al.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the timing and substance of conservation research, management, and public engagement in protected areas around the world. This disruption is evident in US national parks, which play a key role in protecting natural and cultural resources and providing outdoor experiences for the public…

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