Academic Articles October 21st

Source: Rewild to mitigate the climate crisis, urge leading scientists


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.


Safeguarding freshwater life beyond 2020: Recommendations for the new global biodiversity framework from the European experience

  • Source: Conservation Letters
  • Author(s): Charles van Rees et al.
  • Freshwater biodiversity is disproportionately threatened and underprioritized relative to the marine and terrestrial biota, despite supporting a richness of species and ecosystems with their own intrinsic value and providing multiple essential ecosystem services. Future policies and strategies must have a greater focus on the unique ecology of freshwater life and its multiple threats, and now is a critical time to reflect on how this may be achieved…

Importance of species translocations under rapid climate change

  • Source: Conservation Biology
  • Author(s): Nathalie Butt et al.
  • Species that cannot adapt or keep pace with a changing climate are likely to need human intervention to shift to more suitable climates. While hundreds of articles mention using translocation as a climate‐change adaptation tool, in practice, assisted migration as a conservation action remains rare, especially for animals. This is likely due to concern over…

Prioritizing where to restore Earth’s ecosystems

  • Source: Nature
  • Author(s): Simon Ferrier
  • Targets for ecosystem restoration are usually specified in terms of the total area to be restored. A global analysis reveals that the benefits and costs of achieving such targets depend greatly on where this restoration occurs…

Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration

  • Source: Nature
  • Author(s): Bernardo Strassburg et al.
  • Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity1 and stabilizing the climate of the Earth2. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified…

How pastoralists weight future environmental benefits when managing natural resources

  • Source: Conservation Letters
  • Author(s): Amanda Hyman, Orou Gaoue, Charles Tamou, Paul Armsworth
  • Natural resource management involves balancing benefits and costs that accrue through time. How individuals and local communities weight such tradeoffs can profoundly influence how they use and conserve resources. Our goal was to understand time preferences of future benefits for goods that are relevant for developing effective conservation strategies…

Winter movement patterns of a globally endangered avian scavenger in south-western Europe

  • Source: Scientific Reports
  • Author(s): Jon Morant et al.
  • Switching between migration tactics (from migratory to resident or vice versa) occurs at individual and population levels. Here, we describe for the first time the movement ecology of the largest wintering population of Egyptian Vultures (Neophron percnopterus) in south-west Europe…

Improve the roles of nature reserves in conservation of endangered pheasant in a highly urbanized region

  • Source: Scientific Reports
  • Author(s): Kai Song et al.
  • Nature reserves play an extraordinarily important role in conserving animal populations and their habitats. However, landscape change and unreasonable zoning designations often render these protected areas inadequate. Therefore, regular evaluation of the efficacy of protected lands is critical for maintaining and improving management strategies…

The influence of climate variability on demographic rates of avian Afro-palearctic migrants

  • Source: Scientific Reports
  • Author(s): Tomáš Telenský, Petr Klvaňa, Miroslav Jelínek, Jaroslav Cepák, Jiří Reif 
  • Climate is an important driver of changes in animal population size, but its effect on the underlying demographic rates remains insufficiently understood. This is particularly true for avian long-distance migrants which are exposed to different climatic factors at different phases of their annual cycle…

Protect the Antarctic Peninsula — before it’s too late

  • Source: Nature
  • Author(s): Carolyn Hogg et al.
  • Banning fishing in warming coastal waters and limiting tourism and construction on land will help to protect marine mammals and seabirds…

How China could be carbon neutral by mid-century

  • Source: Nature
  • Author(s): Smriti Mallapaty
  • Our special report examines the role of renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture in reaching this ambitious goal…

Ivory Coast without ivory: Massive extinction of African forest elephants in Côte d’Ivoire

  • Source: Plos One
  • Author(s): Jean-Louis Kouakou et al.
  • Here we present updated information on the distribution and conservation status of forest elephant in Côte d’Ivoire based on multiple sources—dung counts on line transects, records of human–elephant conflict, media reports, sign and interview surveys—obtained during the period 2011–2017…

Effects of information and seedling provision on tree planting and survival in smallholder oil palm plantations

  • Source: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
  • Author(s): Katrin Rudolf, Miriam Romero, Rosyani Asnawi, Bambang Irawan, Meike Wollni
  • Native tree planting in oil palm plantations represents one management option to increase biodiversity in oil palm dominated landscapes. Using a randomized controlled trial, we test which policy options can promote tree planting…

A place to land: spatiotemporal drivers of stopover habitat use by migrating birds

  • Source: Ecology Letters
  • Author(s): Emily Cohen et al.
  • Migrating birds require en route habitats to rest and refuel. Yet, habitat use has never been integrated with passage to understand the factors that determine where and when birds stopover during spring and autumn migration. Here, we introduce the stopover‐to‐passage ratio (SPR)…

An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel

  • Source: Nature
  • Author(s): Martin Brandt et al.
  • A large proportion of dryland trees and shrubs grow in isolation, without canopy closure. These non-forest trees have a crucial role in biodiversity, and provide ecosystem services such as carbon storage, food resources and shelter for humans and animals. However, most public interest relating to trees is devoted to forests, and trees outside of forests are not well-documented…

Fuel availability not fire weather controls boreal wildfire severity and carbon emissions

  • Source: Nature Climate Change
  • Author(s): X. Walker et al.
  • Positive feedbacks between climate warming and boreal wildfires are predicted based on top-down controls of fire weather and climate, but C emissions from boreal fires may also depend on bottom-up controls of fuel availability related to edaphic controls and overstory tree composition… 

Biodiversity hotspots at a small scale: the importance of eagles’ nests to many other animals

  • Source: The Scientific Naturalist
  • Author(s): Grzegorz Maciorowski, Łukasz Jankowiak, Tim Sparks, Michał Polakowski, Piotr Tryjanowski
  • Links between the presence of predators and the overall biodiversity of a particular habitat mainly focus on trophic relationships (Roth and Weber 2008, Sergio et al. 2008b, Burgas et al. 2014). However, top‐predators not only have food requirements, but also need to build large, safe nests (Danko 2007). The building and occupancy of such nests by birds of prey are of the greatest importance for several reasons…

Advanced canopy regeneration: an unrecognized mechanism of forest dynamics

  • Source: The Scientific Naturalist
  • Author(s): Iván Díaz et al.
  • Gaps in the forest canopy, created by treefalls, are fundamental to the process of forest dynamics (Yamamoto 2000)… Gap dynamics is central to understanding change in old‐growth forests, and for predicting successional trends and the processes that explain the present structure and composition of tropical and temperate forest communities in the absence of large‐scale disturbances…

Rainfall pulses mediate long‐term plant community compositional dynamics in a semi‐arid rangeland

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Maowei Liang, Xiao Feng, Elise Gornish
  • Semi‐arid rangelands, comprising more than 40% of the Earth’s land surface, provide critical ecosystem services. Worldwide, these ecosystems are experiencing rapid degradation due to overgrazing and precipitation changes. However, how plants respond to these interacting factors remains relatively unexplored…

Grazing and climate change have site‐dependent interactive effects on vegetation in Asian montane rangelands

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Mayank Kohli et al.
  • Climate over Asian montane rangelands is changing faster than the global average, posing serious threats to the future of the region’s livestock‐based economies and cultures. Effects of climate change on rangeland vegetation likely depend on grazing by herbivores but the potential responses of vegetation to such changes in climate and grazing regimes remains unclear…

Relationships of plant traits and soil biota to soil functions change as nitrogen fertiliser rates increase in an intensively managed agricultural system

  • Source: Journal of Applied Ecology
  • Author(s): Kate Orwin et al. 
  • Because plant and soil systems are strongly inter‐linked, manipulating plant traits in intensively managed agricultural systems could be used to improve soil functioning and sustainability. However, we have little understanding of whether the impacts of plant traits on soil systems are modified by other management practices, such as fertiliser use…

Was the COVID‐19 pandemic avoidable? A call for a “solution‐oriented” approach in pathogen evolutionary ecology to prevent future outbreaks

  • Source: Ecology Letters
  • Author(s): Benjamin Roche et al.
  • We show how considering the pandemic through the lenses of the evolutionary ecology of pathogens can help better understand the root causes and devise solutions to prevent the emergence of future pandemics. We call for better integration of these approaches into transdisciplinary research and invite scientists working on the evolutionary ecology of pathogens to contribute to a more “solution‐oriented” agenda with practical applications…

Effects of weed biodiversity on the ecosystem service of weed seed predation along a farming intensity gradient

  • Source: Global Ecology and Conservation
  • Author(s): Matthias Schumacher, Martin Dieterich, Roland Gerhards
  • Weed biodiversity plays a key role in supporting food webs and ecosystem services in agroecosystems. One important service, that reduces weed abundance, is the predation of weed seeds by invertebrates and vertebrates. In this context weed biodiversity may be supportive in maintaining seed predator prevalence. This however, can be highly influenced by farming systems…

Assessing the regional landscape connectivity for multispecies to coordinate on-the-ground needs for mitigating linear infrastructure impact in Brasov – Prahova region

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Ancuta Fedorca et al.
  • While many initiatives, studies and projects are focusing only on modelling wildlife connectivity movement, coordinated efforts should help to deliver adaptative solutions for the on-the-ground needs, while helping the planners and involving communities in landscape protection…

Redistribution of large and medium-sized mammals in a sacred natural site, western China

  • Source: Journal Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Yu Xu et al.
  • Sacred natural sites are the unique landforms protected and worshiped by local communities for cultural or religious purposes. Although the traditionally-managed sites are suggested to have potential in contributing towards biodiversity conservation, few studies have examined the effectiveness of such sites on the protection of animal diversity…

Farmland management regulates ecosystem services in Mediterranean drylands: Assessing the sustainability of agri-environmental payments for bird conservation

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Nuno Faria, Manuel Morales
  • In this study, by linking agricultural intensification indicators with the richness of grassland specialist birds (RGSB), we aimed to perform a preliminary assessment on the sustainability of the agri-environmental measure “Maintenance of the cereal-fallow dryland rotation” evaluating for potential ecosystem service trade-offs resulting from the application of this measure in Southern Portugal…

The historical geography, bioclimatic, and informetric conditions of protected areas in the Brazilian Cerrado

  • Source: Journal for Nature Conservation
  • Author(s): Tatiel Gonçalves, Marcos Gomes, João Nabout
  • The creation, management, and efficiency of PAs are associated with the historical geography (the type of PA and number of PAs over the years), bioclimatic sufficiency, and informetric factors (number of papers and number of hits on the internet). These variables vary across the PA network, and combining these factors can help to…

Categories
Post Archives
Categories