Publications by authors named "Davnah Urbach"

We present forecasts of land-use/land-cover (LULC) change for Switzerland for three time-steps in the 21 century under the representative concentration pathways 4.5 and 8.5, and at 100-m spatial and 14-class thematic resolution.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mountains are an essential component of the global life-support system. They are characterized by a rugged, heterogenous landscape with rapidly changing environmental conditions providing myriad ecological niches over relatively small spatial scales. Although montane species are well adapted to life at extremes, they are highly vulnerable to human derived ecosystem threats.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Changing climate and human demographics in the world's mountains will have increasingly profound environmental and societal consequences across all elevations. Quantifying current human populations in and near mountains is crucial to ensure that any interventions in these complex social-ecological systems are appropriately resourced, and that valuable ecosystems are effectively protected. However, comprehensive and reproducible analyses on this subject are lacking.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A standardized delineation of the world's mountains has many applications in research, education, and the science-policy interface. Here we provide a new inventory of 8616 mountain ranges developed under the auspices of the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA). Building on an earlier compilation, the presented geospatial database uses a further advanced and generalized mountain definition and a semi-automated method to enable globally standardized, transparent delineations of mountain ranges worldwide.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Climate change is causing plant species in mountains worldwide to shift their elevational ranges, complicating efforts to monitor these changes due to varying sampling methods.
  • The Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN) developed a standardized protocol to assess native and non-native plant distributions along elevation gradients over time, using surveys conducted every five years at specific sites.
  • Initial results show unique elevational patterns for native plant richness and a global decline in non-native species, highlighting disturbed areas like road edges as hotspots for plant invasions, emphasizing the need for more global studies to guide conservation efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Managing fisheries resources to maintain healthy ecosystems is one of the main goals of the ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF). While a number of international treaties call for the implementation of EAF, there are still gaps in the underlying methodology. One aspect that has received substantial scientific attention recently is fisheries-induced evolution (FIE).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genetic association studies have become standard approaches to characterize the genetic and epigenetic variability associated with cancer development, including predispositions and mutations. However, the bewildering genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity inherent in cancer both magnifies the conceptual and methodological problems associated with these approaches and renders difficult the translation of available genetic information into a knowledge that is both biologically sound and clinically relevant. Here, we elaborate on the underlying causes of this complexity, illustrate why it represents a challenge for genetic association studies, and briefly discuss how it can be reconciled with the ultimate goals of identifying targetable disease pathways and successfully treating individual patients.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It is becoming increasingly recognized that fishing (and other forms of nonrandom harvesting) can have profound evolutionary consequences for life history traits. A recent and welcome publication provided the first description of how sexual selection might influence the outcome of fisheries-induced evolution (FIE). One of the main conclusions was that if sexual selection generates a positive relationship between body size and reproductive success, increased fishing pressure on large individuals causes stronger selection for smaller body size.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In recent years, numerous cases of morphological gonadal alterations in fish have been recorded throughout the world and across a wide range of species. In the whitefish Coregonus fatioi from the pre-alpine Lake Thun (Switzerland), the frequency of gonadal alterations is particularly high and the variety of alteration types large. Little is known about the proximal causes and the direct consequences of these morphological features on population persistence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Some models of sexual selection predict that individuals vary in their genetic quality and reveal some of this variation in their secondary sexual characteristics. Alpine whitefish (Coregonus sp.) develop breeding tubercles shortly before their spawning season.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Some models of sexual selection predict that individuals vary in their genetic quality and reveal some of this variation in their secondary sexual characteristics. Alpine whitefish (Coregonus sp.) develop breeding tubercles shortly before their spawning season.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: fwrite(): Write of 34 bytes failed with errno=28 No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 272

Backtrace:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data using user defined save handler. (session.save_path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Unknown

Line Number: 0

Backtrace: