The importance of temporal scale in distribution modeling of migratory Caspian Kutum, .

The choice of temporal resolution has high importance in ecological modeling, which can greatly affect the identification of the main drivers of an organism's distribution, considering the spatiotemporal dynamism of environmental predictors as well as organisms' abundance. The present study aimed to identify the spatiotemporal distribution patterns of Caspian Kutum, , along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, north of Iran, evaluating multiple temporal resolutions of data. The boosted regression trees (BRT) method was used to model fish catch distribution using a set of environmental predictors.

Application of remote sensing to understand the role of Galician feral horses in the biomass reduction of a shrub-grassland-dominated landscape.

Galician forests in northwestern Spain are subject to frequent wildfires with high environmental and economic costs. In addition, due to the consequences of climate change, these fires are becoming more virulent, occurring throughout the year, and taking place in populated areas, in some cases involving the loss of human life. Therefore, forest fire prevention is even more relevant than mitigating its consequences.

Identifying potential provenances for climate-change adaptation using spatially variable coefficient models.

Background: Selection of climate-change adapted ecotypes of commercially valuable species to date relies on DNA-assisted screening followed by growth trials. For trees, such trials can take decades, hence any approach that supports focussing on a likely set of candidates may save time and money. We use a non-stationary statistical analysis with spatially varying coefficients to identify ecotypes that indicate first regions of similarly adapted varieties of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirbel) Franco) in North America.

Predicting plant-pollinator interactions: concepts, methods, and challenges.

Plant-pollinator interactions are ecologically and economically important, and, as a result, their prediction is a crucial theoretical and applied goal for ecologists. Although various analytical methods are available, we still have a limited ability to predict plant-pollinator interactions. The predictive ability of different plant-pollinator interaction models depends on the specific definitions used to conceptualize and quantify species attributes (e.

Reply to: "Research on agroforestry systems and biodiversity conservation: what can we conclude so far and what should we improve?" by Boinot et al. 2022.

In our article 'European agroforestry has no unequivocal effect on biodiversity: a time-cumulative meta-analysis' (BMC Ecology and Evolution, 2021) we synthesize the effect of agroforestry on biodiversity. Boinot et al. (BMC Ecology and Evolution, 2022) criticise our approach arguing that our definitions of agroforestry and biodiversity are too narrow; that we use inappropriate control sites for primary studies lacking distance to the treatment sites; that there are too few studies for a meta-analysis in silvoarable systems; and that local practice should be emphasized.

Quantitative Prediction of Interactions in Bipartite Networks Based on Traits, Abundances, and Phylogeny.

AbstractEcological interactions link species in networks. Loss of species from or introduction of new species into an existing network may have substantial effects for interaction patterns. Predicting changes in interaction frequency while allowing for rewiring of existing interactions-and hence estimating the consequences of community compositional changes-is thus a central challenge for network ecology.

European agroforestry has no unequivocal effect on biodiversity: a time-cumulative meta-analysis.

Background: Agroforestry is a production system combining trees with crops or livestock. It has the potential to increase biodiversity in relation to single-use systems, such as pastures or cropland, by providing a higher habitat heterogeneity. In a literature review and subsequent meta-analysis, we investigated the relationship between biodiversity and agroforestry and critically appraised the underlying evidence of the results.

Within-day dynamics of plant-pollinator networks are dominated by early flower closure: an experimental test of network plasticity.

Temporal variability of plant-pollinator interactions is important for fully understanding the structure, function, and stability of plant-pollinator networks, but most network studies so far have ignored within-day dynamics. Strong diel dynamics (e.g.

Increasing connectivity enhances habitat specialists but simplifies plant-insect food webs.

Strong declines of grassland species diversity in small and isolated grassland patches have been observed at local and landscape scales. Here, we study how plant-herbivore interaction webs and habitat specialisation of leafhopper communities change with the size of calcareous grassland fragments and landscape connectivity. We surveyed leafhoppers and plants on 14 small (0.

Spatial validation reveals poor predictive performance of large-scale ecological mapping models.

Mapping aboveground forest biomass is central for assessing the global carbon balance. However, current large-scale maps show strong disparities, despite good validation statistics of their underlying models. Here, we attribute this contradiction to a flaw in the validation methods, which ignore spatial autocorrelation (SAC) in data, leading to overoptimistic assessment of model predictive power.

Plant species richness increases with light availability, but not variability, in temperate forests understorey.

Background: Temperate forest understorey vegetation poses an excellent study system to investigate whether increases in resource availability lead to an increase in plant species richness. Most sunlight is absorbed by the species-poor tree canopy, making the much more species-rich understorey species inhabit a severely resource-limited habitat. Additionally, the heterogeneity of light availability, resulting from management-moderated tree composition and age structure, may contribute to species coexistence.

Co-occurrence patterns and the large-scale spatial structure of benthic communities in seagrass meadows and bare sand.

Background: Species distribution models are commonly used tools to describe diversity patterns and support conservation measures. There is a wide range of approaches to developing SDMs, each highlighting different characteristics of both the data and the ecology of the species or assemblages represented by the data. Yet, signals of species co-occurrences in community data are usually ignored, due to the assumption that such structuring roles of species co-occurrences are limited to small spatial scales and require experimental studies to be detected.

Spatial conservation prioritisation in data-poor countries: a quantitative sensitivity analysis using multiple taxa.

Background: Spatial conservation prioritisation (SCP) is a set of computational tools designed to support the efficient spatial allocation of priority areas for conservation actions, but it is subject to many sources of uncertainty which should be accounted for during the prioritisation process. We quantified the sensitivity of an SCP application (using software Zonation) to possible sources of uncertainty in data-poor situations, including the use of different surrogate options; correction for sampling bias; how to integrate connectivity; the choice of species distribution modelling (SDM) algorithm; how cells are removed from the landscape; and two methods of assigning weights to species (red-list status or prediction uncertainty). Further, we evaluated the effectiveness of the Egyptian protected areas for conservation, and spatially allocated the top priority sites for further on-the-ground evaluation as potential areas for protected areas expansion.

Evaluating the effectiveness of retention forestry to enhance biodiversity in production forests of Central Europe using an interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach.

Retention forestry, which retains a portion of the original stand at the time of harvesting to maintain continuity of structural and compositional diversity, has been originally developed to mitigate the impacts of clear-cutting. Retention of habitat trees and deadwood has since become common practice also in continuous-cover forests of Central Europe. While the use of retention in these forests is plausible, the evidence base for its application is lacking, trade-offs have not been quantified, it is not clear what support it receives from forest owners and other stakeholders and how it is best integrated into forest management practices.

A new model explaining the origin of different topologies in interaction networks.

Nestedness and modularity have been recurrently observed in species interaction networks. Some studies argue that those topologies result from selection against unstable networks, and others propose that they likely emerge from processes driving the interactions between pairs of species. Here we present a model that simulates the evolution of consumer species using resource species following simple rules derived from the integrative hypothesis of specialization (IHS).

African elephant poaching rates correlate with local poverty, national corruption and global ivory price.

Poaching is contributing to rapid declines in elephant populations across Africa. Following high-profile changes in the political environment, the overall number of illegally killed elephants in Africa seems to be falling, but to evaluate potential conservation interventions we must understand the processes driving poaching rates at local and global scales. Here we show that annual poaching rates in 53 sites strongly correlate with proxies of ivory demand in the main Chinese markets, whereas between-country and between-site variation is strongly associated with indicators of corruption and poverty.

Spatial behavior in rehabilitated orangutans in Sumatra: Where do they go?

Wildlife restoration is one of the key components of conservation strategies, and this includes the rehabilitation and release of animals confiscated from wildlife traffickers. When primates are re-introduced, most individuals need a pre-release training to acquire the skills needed to survive in the wild. Pre-release training may either negatively or positively affect primate post-release behavior and survival.