Further reduction in soil bacterial diversity under severe acidification in European temperate forests.

Despite a decrease in industrial nitrogen and sulfur deposition over recent decades, soil acidification remains a persistent challenge to European forest health, especially in regions of intense agriculture and urbanisation. Using topsoil eDNA metabarcoding and functional annotations from a sample of 49 plots (each 30 × 30 m) located in The Netherlands and Germany, we investigated the effect of severe acidification on bacterial taxonomic diversity under different forest types and explored potential functional implications for nutrient cycling. Furthermore, we assessed which soil parameters known to influence soil bacterial communities affect these acidophilic communities.

Mapping temperate old-growth forests in Central Europe using ALS and Sentinel-2A multispectral data.

Old-growth forests are essential to preserve biodiversity and play an important role in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change. However, their existence across Europe is vulnerable due to the scarcity of their distribution, logging, and environmental threats. Therefore, providing the current status of old-growth forests across Europe is essential to aiding informed conservation efforts and sustainable forest management.

High-throughput Soxhlet extraction method applied for analysis of leaf lignocellulose and non-structural substances.

The traditional Soxhlet extraction method is commonly employed to extract soluble components from non-soluble components in a solid matrix, for example, non-structural substances in biomass samples that can be separated from structural lignocellulosic compounds in biomass samples. Conventional laboratory procedures for such extractions typically involve a low sample throughput, with each run being performed individually, resulting in time-consuming and labour-intensive processes, making them impractical for analysing large sample sets. In research fields such as Earth Observation in Forest Ecosystems, extensive fieldwork sampling is required across large study areas, resulting in a substantial number of leaf samples, each with limited mass.

Forest top canopy bacterial communities are influenced by elevation and host tree traits.

Background: The phyllosphere microbiome is crucial for plant health and ecosystem functioning. While host species play a determining role in shaping the phyllosphere microbiome, host trees of the same species that are subjected to different environmental conditions can still exhibit large degrees of variation in their microbiome diversity and composition. Whether these intra-specific variations in phyllosphere microbiome diversity and composition can be observed over the broader expanse of forest landscapes remains unclear.

Habitat visibility affects the behavioral response of a large herbivore to human disturbance in forest landscapes.

Wildlife can perceive humans as predators and human disturbance, whether lethal (e.g., hunting) or non-lethal (e.

LiDAR reveals a preference for intermediate visibility by a forest-dwelling ungulate species.

Visibility (viewshed) plays a significant and diverse role in animals' behaviour and fitness. Understanding how visibility influences animal behaviour requires the measurement of habitat visibility at spatial scales commensurate to individual animal choices. However, measuring habitat visibility at a fine spatial scale over a landscape is a challenge, particularly in highly heterogeneous landscapes (e.

The Spectral Species Concept in Living Color.

Biodiversity monitoring is an almost inconceivable challenge at the scale of the entire Earth. The current (and soon to be flown) generation of spaceborne and airborne optical sensors (i.e.

Linking the past and present to predict the distribution of Asian crested ibis (Nipponia nippon) under global changes.

Understanding how species' ecological niches adapt to environmental changes through time is critical for predicting the effect of future global change on endangered species. Yet few studies have incorporated knowledge of past niche shifting into the assessment of species' future fate in a changing world. In this study, we integrated the ecological niche dynamics into the species distribution modeling of the Asian crested ibis (Nipponia nippon) in East Asia.

rasterdiv-An Information Theory tailored R package for measuring ecosystem heterogeneity from space: To the origin and back.

Ecosystem heterogeneity has been widely recognized as a key ecological indicator of several ecological functions, diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, population connectivity or gene flow.In this paper, we present a new R package-rasterdiv-to calculate heterogeneity indices based on remotely sensed data. We also provide an ecological application at the landscape scale and demonstrate its power in revealing potentially hidden heterogeneity patterns.

Priority list of biodiversity metrics to observe from space.

Monitoring global biodiversity from space through remotely sensing geospatial patterns has high potential to add to our knowledge acquired by field observation. Although a framework of essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) is emerging for monitoring biodiversity, its poor alignment with remote sensing products hinders interpolation between field observations. This study compiles a comprehensive, prioritized list of remote sensing biodiversity products that can further improve the monitoring of geospatial biodiversity patterns, enhancing the EBV framework and its applicability.

Comment on "The global tree restoration potential".

Bastin (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) claim that 205 gigatonnes of carbon can be globally sequestered by restoring 0.9 billion hectares of forest and woodland canopy cover.

Heavy metal pollution at mine sites estimated from reflectance spectroscopy following correction for skewed data.

The heavy metal concentration of soil samples often exhibits a skewed distribution, especially for soil samples from mining areas with an extremely high concentration of heavy metals. In this study, to model soil contamination in mining areas using reflectance spectroscopy, the skewed distribution was corrected and heavy metal concentration estimated. In total, 46 soil samples from a mining area, along with corresponding field soil spectra, were collected.

Climate and land use changes will degrade the distribution of Rhododendrons in China.

Biodiversity loss and variation in species responses to climate and land use change have been found across broad taxonomic groups. However, whether species from the same taxonomic group with distinct geographical ranges will respond differently is poorly understood. The aim of this study is to predict the potential impacts of future climate and land use change on the distribution of narrow- and wide-ranging Rhododendron species, and estimate their relative contribution in China.

Identifying rice stress on a regional scale from multi-temporal satellite images using a Bayesian method.

Crops are prone to various types of stress, such as caused by heavy metals, drought and pest/disease, during their life cycle. Heavy metal stress in crops poses a serious threat to crop quality and human health. However, differentiating between heavy metal and non-heavy metal stress presents a great challenge, since responses to environmental stress in crops are complex and uncertain, with different stressors possibly triggering similar canopy reflectance responses.

Heavy metal-induced stress in rice crops detected using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 satellite images.

Regional-level information on heavy metal pollution in agro-ecosystems is essential for food security because excessive levels of heavy metals in crops may pose risks to humans. However, collecting this information over large areas is inherently costly. This paper investigates the possibility of applying multi-temporal Sentinel-2 satellite images to detect heavy metal-induced stress (i.

Identification of Griffon Vulture's Flight Types Using High-Resolution Tracking Data.

Being one of the most frequently killed raptors by collision with wind turbines, little is known about the Griffon vulture's flight strategies and behaviour in a fine scale. In this study, we used high-resolution tracking data to differentiate between the most frequently observed flight types of the Griffon, and evaluated the performance of our proposed approach by an independent observation during a period of 4 weeks of fieldwork. Five passive flight types including three types of soaring and two types of gliding were discriminated using the patterns of measured GPS locations.

Impacts of future climate and land cover changes on threatened mammals in the semi-arid Chinese Altai Mountains.

Dryland biodiversity plays important roles in the fight against desertification and poverty, but is highly vulnerable to the impacts of environmental change. However, little research has been conducted on dual pressure from climate and land cover changes on biodiversity in arid and semi-arid environments. Concequntly, it is crutial to understand the potential impacts of future climate and land cover changes on dryland biodiversity.

Building essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) of species distribution and abundance at a global scale.

Much biodiversity data is collected worldwide, but it remains challenging to assemble the scattered knowledge for assessing biodiversity status and trends. The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was introduced to structure biodiversity monitoring globally, and to harmonize and standardize biodiversity data from disparate sources to capture a minimum set of critical variables required to study, report and manage biodiversity change. Here, we assess the challenges of a 'Big Data' approach to building global EBV data products across taxa and spatiotemporal scales, focusing on species distribution and abundance.

Using Poaching Levels and Elephant Distribution to Assess the Conservation Efficacy of Private, Communal and Government Land in Northern Kenya.

Efforts to curb elephant poaching have focused on reducing demand, confiscating ivory and boosting security patrols in elephant range. Where land is under multiple uses and ownership, determining the local poaching dynamics is important for identifying successful conservation models. Using 2,403 verified elephant, Loxodonta africana, mortality records collected from 2002 to 2012 and the results of aerial total counts of elephants conducted in 2002, 2008 and 2012 for the Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem of northern Kenya, we sought to determine the influence of land ownership and use on diurnal elephant distribution and on poaching levels.