Publications by authors named "Clare L Wilkinson"
Article Synopsis
- Logged and disturbed forests, often seen as degraded, actually harbor significant biodiversity and should not be dismissed in conservation efforts.
- A study in Sabah, Malaysia examined the effects of logging intensity on 1,681 species, revealing two important conservation thresholds.
- Lightly logged forests (less than 29% biomass removed) can recover well, while heavily degraded forests (over 68% biomass removed) may need more intensive recovery efforts, highlighting the varying conservation values of logged forests.
Article Synopsis
- * A comprehensive review of 29 studies showed that oil palm plantations without riparian buffers had significantly fewer stream taxa compared to both primary and disturbed forests, while buffers only partially mitigated these effects.
- * The research found that while overall abundance of species didn't significantly differ across land uses due to generalist species thriving, the specific composition and richness of aquatic communities were notably altered by the conversion from forest to oil palm.
Studies have shown that food chain length is governed by interactions between species richness, ecosystem size and resource availability. While redundant trophic links may buffer impacts of species loss on food chain length, higher extinction risks associated with predators may result in bottom-heavy food webs with shorter food chains. The lack of consensus in earlier empirical studies relating species richness and food chain length reflects the need to account robustly for the factors described above.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Southeast Asia, biodiversity-rich forests are being extensively logged and converted to oil palm monocultures. Although the impacts of these changes on biodiversity are largely well documented, we know addition to samples we collected in 201 little about how these large-scale impacts affect freshwater trophic ecology. We used stable isotope analyses (SIA) to determine the impacts of land-use changes on the relative contribution of allochthonous and autochthonous basal resources in 19 stream food webs.
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