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Stop misuse of biodiversity offsets
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Governments should not meet existing conservation targets using the compensation that developers pay for damaging biodiversity, say Martine Maron and colleagues.
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How life shaped Earth
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Earth is much more complex than all the other solar system objects that we know. Thanks to its rich and diverse geology, our planet can offer habitats to a wide range of living species. Emerging insights suggest that this is not just a happy coincidence, but that life itself has in many ways helped to shape the planet. Michael Gross reports.
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Bird Richness and Abundance in Response to Urban Form in a Latin American City
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There is mounting evidence that urban areas influence biodiversity. Generalizations how- ever require that multiple urban areas on multiple continents be examined. Here we evaluated the role of urban areas on avian diversity for a South American city, allowing us to examine the effects of urban features common worldwide, using the city of Valdivia, Chile as case study. We assessed the number of birds and their relative abundance in 152 grid cells of equal size (250 m2) distributed across the city. We estimated nine independent variables: land cover diversity (DC), building density (BD), impervious surface (IS),municipal green space (MG),non-municipal green space (NG), domestic garden space (DG), distance to the periphery (DP), social welfare index (SW), and vegetation diversity (RV). Impervious surface represent 41.8% of the study area, while municipal green, non-municipal green and domestic garden represent 11.6%, 23.6% and 16% of the non- man made surface. Exotic vegetation species represent 74.6% of the total species identified across the city. We found 32 bird species, all native with the exception of House Sparrow and Rock Pigeon. The most common species were House Sparrow and Chilean Swallow. Total bird richness responds negatively to IS and MG, while native bird richness responds positively to NG and negatively to BD, IS DG and, RV. Total abundance increase in areas with higher values of DC and BD, and decrease in areas of higher values of IS, SW and VR. Native bird abundance responds positively to NG and negatively to BD, IS MG, DG and RV. Our results suggest that not all the general patterns described in previous studies, conducted mainly in the USA, Europe, and Australia, can be applied to Latin American cities, having important implications for urban planning. Conservation efforts should focus on non-municipal areas, which harbor higher bird diversity, while municipal green areas need to be improved to include elements that can enhance habitat quality for birds and other species. These findings are relevant for urban planning in where both types of green space need to be considered, especially non-municipal green areas, which includes wetlands, today critically threatened by urban development.
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Biotic Multipliers of Climate Change
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A focus on species interactions may improve predictions of the effects of climate change
on ecosystems.
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Disturbance−diversity models: what do they really predict and how are they tested?
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The intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) and the dynamic equilibrium model (DEM) are influential theories in ecology. The IDH predicts large species numbers at intermediate levels of disturbance and the DEM predicts that the effect of disturbance depends on the level of productivity. However, various indices of diversity are considered more commonly than the predicted number of species in tests of the hypotheses. This issue reaches beyond the scientific community as the predictions of the IDH and the DEM are used in the management of national parks and reserves. In order to compare responses with disturbance among measures of biodiversity, we used two different approaches of mathematical modelling and conducted an extensive meta-analysis. Two-thirds of the surveyed studies present different results for different diversity measures. Accordingly, the meta-analysis showed a narrow range of negative quadratic regression components for richness, but not evenness. Also, the two models support the IDH and the DEM, respectively, when biodiversity is measured as species richness, but predict evenness to increase with increasing disturbance, for all levels of productivity. Consequently, studies that use compound indices of diversity should present logical arguments, a priori, to why a specific index of diversity should peak in response to disturbance.
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Ecosystem services: From theory to implementation
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Around the world, leaders are increasingly recognizing ecosystems as natural capital assets that supply life-support services of tremendous value. The challenge is to turn this recognition into incentives and institutions that will guide wise investments in natural capital, on a large scale. Advances are required on three key fronts, each featured here: the science of ecosystem production functions and service mapping; the design of appropriate finance, policy, and governance systems; and the art of implementing these in diverse biophysical and social contexts. Scientific understanding of ecosystem production functions is improving rapidly but remains a limiting factor in incorporating natural capital into decisions, via systems of national accounting and other mechanisms. Novel institutional structures are being established for a broad array of services and places, creating a need and opportunity for systematic assessment of their scope and limitations. Finally, it is clear that formal sharing of experience, and defining of priorities for future work, could greatly accelerate the rate of innova- tion and uptake of new approaches.
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Evolutionary history and the effect of biodiversity on plant productivity
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Loss of biological diversity because of extinction is one of the most pronounced changes to the global environment. For several decades, researchers have tried to understand how changes in biodiversity might impact biomass production by examining how biomass correlates with a number of biodiversity metrics (especially the number of species and functional groups). This body of research has focused on species with the implicit assumption that they are independent entities. However, functional and ecological similarities are shaped by patterns of common ancestry, such that distantly related species might contribute more to production than close relatives, perhaps by increasing niche breadth. Here, we analyze 2 decades of experiments performed in grassland ecosystems throughout the world and examine whether the evolutionary relationships among the species comprising a community predict how biodiversity impacts plant biomass production. We show that the amount of phylogenetic diversity within communities explained significantly more variation in plant community biomass than other measures of diversity, such as the number of species or functional groups. Our results reveal how evolutionary history can provide critical information for understanding, predicting, and potentially ameliorating the effects of biodiversity loss and should serve as an impetus for new biodiversity experiments.
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Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change
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Ecological changes in the phenology and distribution of plants and animals are occurring in all well-studied marine, freshwater, and terrestrial groups. These observed changes are heavily biased in the directions predicted from global warming and have been linked to local or regional climate change through correlations between climate and biological variation, field and laboratory experiments, and physiological research. Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change. Tropical coral reefs and amphibians have been most negatively affected. Predator-prey and plant-insect interactions have been disrupted when interacting species have responded differently to warming. Evolutionary adaptations to warmer conditions have occurred in the interiors of species’ ranges, and resource use and dispersal have evolved rapidly at expanding range margins. Observed genetic shifts modulate local effects of climate change, but there is little evidence that they will mitigate negative effects at the species level.
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Conservation value of forests attacked by bark beetles: Highest number of indicator species is found in early successional stages
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Heavy natural disturbance in large protected areas of former commercial forests increasingly evokes European parliaments to call for management intervention because a loss of habitats and species is feared. In contrast, natural early successional habitats have recently been recognised as important for conservation. Current knowledge in this field mostly results from studies dealing only with selected taxa. Here we analyse the success of species across 24 lineages of three kingdoms in the Bavarian Forest National Park (Germany) after 15 years of a European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus L.) outbreak that led to rapid canopy opening. Using indicator species analysis, we found 257 species with a significant preference for open forests and 149 species with a preference for closed forests, but only 82 species with a preference for the stand conditions transitional between open and closed forests. The large number of species with a preference for open forests across lineages supports the role of this bark beetle as a keystone species for a broad array of species. The slowdown of the outbreak after 15 years in the core zone of the national park resulted in less than half of the area being affected, due to variability in stand ages and tree species mixtures. Our case study is representative of the tree species composition and size of many large protected montane areas in Central European countries and illustrates that (1) natural disturbances increase biodiversity in formerly managed forests and (2) a montane protected area spanning 10,000 ha of low range mountains is likely sufficient to allow natural disturbances without a biased loss of closed-forest species.
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BOTANY AND A CHANGING WORLD: INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON GLOBAL BIOLOGICAL CHANGE
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The impacts of global change have heightened the need to understand how organisms respond to and influence these changes. Can we forecast how change at the global scale may lead to biological change? Can we identify systems, processes, and organisms that are most vulnerable to global changes? Can we use this understanding to enhance resilience to global changes? This special issue on global biological change emphasizes the integration of botanical information at different biological levels to gain perspective on the direct and indirect effects of global change. Contributions span a range of spatial scales and include both ecological and evolutionary timescales and highlight work across levels of organization, including cellular and physiological processes, individuals, populations, and ecosystems. Integrative botanical approaches to global change are critical for the eco- logical and evolutionary insights they provide and for the implications these studies have for species conservation and ecosys- tem management.
Key words: community dynamics; flowering phenology; functional traits; global biological change; invasive species; land-use patterns; plant–microbial interactions; species interactions.
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