Publications by authors named "Job Aben"

Human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC) is creating environments deviating considerably from natural habitats in which species evolved. Concurrently, climate warming is pushing species' climatic envelopes to geographic regions that offer novel ecological conditions. The persistence of species is likely affected by the interplay between the degree of ecological novelty and phenotypic plasticity, which in turn may shape an organism's range-shifting ability.

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Animal spatial behaviour is often presumed to reflect responses to visual cues. However, inference of behaviour in relation to the environment is challenged by the lack of objective methods to identify the information that effectively is available to an animal from a given location. In general, animals are assumed to have unconstrained information on the environment within a detection circle of a certain radius (the perceptual range; PR).

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Article Synopsis
  • Biodiversity hotspots with high human populations require conservation management that goes beyond just protecting pristine habitats, focusing instead on improving connectivity between fragmented habitats to reduce species extinction risks.
  • A novel individual-based modeling platform was used to assess different management strategies for conserving forest birds, revealing that increasing habitat area led to the most significant population growth, but the effectiveness varied based on spatial planning.
  • The study highlights that adding small habitat patches can complicate conservation efforts by creating 'dispersal sinks' while improving matrix connectivity with stepping stones can enhance dispersal success for smaller patches, emphasizing the need for realistic modeling of dispersal behaviors in conservation planning.
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Article Synopsis
  • * A new database has been created, containing over 1.6 million samples from 78 countries, which includes data on around 28,000 species experiencing various types of human impacts across different ecosystems.
  • * This comprehensive dataset, part of the PREDICTS project, offers a much broader perspective for analyzing biodiversity trends and will be publicly accessible in 2015, enhancing our understanding of ecological changes.
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Visual signals are shaped by variation in the signaling environment through a process termed sensory drive, sometimes leading to speciation. However, the evidence for sensory drive in acoustic signals is restricted to comparisons between highly dissimilar habitats, or single-species studies in which it is difficult to rule out the influence of undetected ecological variables, pleiotropic effects, or chance. Here we assess whether this form of sensory drive-often termed "acoustic adaptation"-can generate signal divergence across ecological gradients.

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