A large-scale assessment of eastern whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus) occupancy across a gradient of forest management intensity using autonomous recording units.

Conservationists spend considerable resources to create and enhance wildlife habitat. Monitoring how species respond to these efforts helps managers allocate limited resources. However, monitoring efforts often encounter logistical challenges that are exacerbated as geographic extent increases.

Individual identification in acoustic recordings.

Recent advances in bioacoustics combined with acoustic individual identification (AIID) could open frontiers for ecological and evolutionary research because traditional methods of identifying individuals are invasive, expensive, labor-intensive, and potentially biased. Despite overwhelming evidence that most taxa have individual acoustic signatures, the application of AIID remains challenging and uncommon. Furthermore, the methods most commonly used for AIID are not compatible with many potential AIID applications.

Influence of microclimate and forest management on bat species faced with global change.

Climate refugia, areas where climate is expected to remain relatively stable, can offer a near-term safe haven for species sensitive to warming temperatures and drought. Understanding the influence of temperature, moisture, and disturbance on sensitive species is critical during this time of rapid climate change. Coastal habitats can serve as important refugia.

A landmark environmental law looks ahead.

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call "the pitbull of environmental laws." In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, obliging agencies to draw upon the best available science to protect species and habitats. Yet human pressures continue to push the planet toward extinctions on a massive scale.

A Quantitative Evaluation of the Performance of the Low-Cost AudioMoth Acoustic Recording Unit.

The AudioMoth is a popular autonomous recording unit (ARU) that is widely used to record vocalizing species in the field. Despite its growing use, there have been few quantitative tests on the performance of this recorder. Such information is needed to design effective field surveys and to appropriately analyze recordings made by this device.

Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Efficiently Extract Immense Phenological Data From Community Science Images.

Community science image libraries offer a massive, but largely untapped, source of observational data for phenological research. The iNaturalist platform offers a particularly rich archive, containing more than 49 million verifiable, georeferenced, open access images, encompassing seven continents and over 278,000 species. A critical limitation preventing scientists from taking full advantage of this rich data source is labor.

A unified framework for species spatial patterns: Linking the occupancy area curve, Taylor's Law, the neighborhood density function and two-plot species turnover.

The description of spatial patterns in species distributions is central to research throughout ecology. In this manuscript, we demonstrate that five of the most widely used species-level spatial patterns are not only related, but can in fact be quantitatively derived from each other under minimal assumptions: the occupancy area curve, Taylor's Law, the neighborhood density function, a two-plot variant of Taylor's Law and two-plot single-species turnover. We present an overarching mathematical framework and derivations for several theoretical example cases, along with a simulation study and empirical analysis that applies the framework to data from the Barro Colorado Island tropical forest plot.

An annotated set of audio recordings of Eastern North American birds containing frequency, time, and species information.

Acoustic recordings of soundscapes are an important category of audio data that can be useful for answering a variety of questions, and an entire discipline within ecology, dubbed "soundscape ecology," has risen to study them. Bird sound is often the focus of studies of soundscapes due to the ubiquitousness of birds in most terrestrial environments and their high vocal activity. Autonomous acoustic recorders have increased the quantity and availability of recordings of natural soundscapes while mitigating the impact of human observers on community behavior.

Automated detection of frog calls and choruses by pulse repetition rate.

Anurans (frogs and toads) are among the most globally threatened taxonomic groups. Successful conservation of anurans will rely on improved data on the status and changes in local populations, particularly for rare and threatened species. Automated sensors, such as acoustic recorders, have the potential to provide such data by massively increasing the spatial and temporal scale of population sampling efforts.

Acoustic localization of terrestrial wildlife: Current practices and future opportunities.

Autonomous acoustic recorders are an increasingly popular method for low-disturbance, large-scale monitoring of sound-producing animals, such as birds, anurans, bats, and other mammals. A specialized use of autonomous recording units (ARUs) is acoustic localization, in which a vocalizing animal is located spatially, usually by quantifying the time delay of arrival of its sound at an array of time-synchronized microphones. To describe trends in the literature, identify considerations for field biologists who wish to use these systems, and suggest advancements that will improve the field of acoustic localization, we comprehensively review published applications of wildlife localization in terrestrial environments.

Bird-friendly wine country through diversified vineyards.

Vinecology, the integration of ecological and viticultural practices, focuses on the working landscapes of the Mediterranean-climate biomes to make wine-grape production compatible with species conservation. We examined how maintaining remnant native vegetation and surrounding natural areas in and around vineyards, two primary practices of vinecology, may influence bird community richness and composition across a vineyard landscape. We conducted bird surveys over spring and summer (October-January) at 120 sites across a wine-grape growing region in central Chile.

Consumption-Based Conservation Targeting: Linking Biodiversity Loss to Upstream Demand through a Global Wildlife Footprint.

Although most conservation efforts address the direct, local causes of biodiversity loss, effective long-term conservation will require complementary efforts to reduce the upstream economic pressures, such as demands for food and forest products, which ultimately drive these downstream losses. Here, we present a wildlife footprint analysis that links global losses of wild birds to consumer purchases across 57 economic sectors in 129 regions. The United States, India, China, and Brazil have the largest regional wildlife footprints, while per-person footprints are highest in Mongolia, Australia, Botswana, and the United Arab Emirates.

Good enough practices in scientific computing.

Computers are now essential in all branches of science, but most researchers are never taught the equivalent of basic lab skills for research computing. As a result, data can get lost, analyses can take much longer than necessary, and researchers are limited in how effectively they can work with software and data. Computing workflows need to follow the same practices as lab projects and notebooks, with organized data, documented steps, and the project structured for reproducibility, but researchers new to computing often don't know where to start.

Predicting extinction debt from community patterns.

A significant challenge in both measuring and predicting species extinction rates at global and local scales is the possibility of extinction debt, time-delayed extinctions that occur gradually following an initial impact. Here we examine how relative abundance distributions and spatial aggregation combine to influence the likely magnitude of future extinction debt following habitat loss or climate-driven range contraction. Our analysis is based on several fundamental premises regarding abundance distributions, most importantly that species abundances immediately following habitat loss are a sample from an initial relative abundance distribution and that the long-term, steady-state form of the species abundance distribution is a property of the biology of a community and not of area.

Estimating biodiversity impacts without field surveys: A case study in northern Borneo.

In many regions of the world, biodiversity surveys are not routinely conducted prior to activities that lead to land conversion, such as development projects. Here we use top-down methods based on global range maps and bottom-up methods based on macroecological scaling laws to illuminate the otherwise hidden biodiversity impacts of three large hydroelectric dams in the state of Sarawak in northern Borneo. Our retrospective impact assessment finds that the three reservoirs inundate habitat for 331 species of birds (3 million individuals) and 164 species of mammals (110 million individuals).

Inferring regional-scale species diversity from small-plot censuses.

Estimation of the number of species at spatial scales too large to census directly is a longstanding ecological challenge. A recent comprehensive census of tropical arthropods and trees in Panama provides a unique opportunity to apply an inference procedure for up-scaling species richness and thereby make progress toward that goal. Confidence in the underlying theory is first established by showing that the method accurately predicts the species abundance distribution for trees and arthropods, and in particular accurately captures the rare tail of the observed distributions.

Large roads reduce bat activity across multiple species.

Although the negative impacts of roads on many terrestrial vertebrate and bird populations are well documented, there have been few studies of the road ecology of bats. To examine the effects of large roads on bat populations, we used acoustic recorders to survey bat activity along ten 300 m transects bordering three large highways in northern California, applying a newly developed statistical classifier to identify recorded calls to the species level. Nightly counts of bat passes were analyzed with generalized linear mixed models to determine the relationship between bat activity and distance from a road.

Taxon categories and the universal species-area relationship (a comment on Šizling et al., “between geometry and biology:the problem of universality of the species-area relationship”).

A theory of macroecology based on the maximum information entropy (MaxEnt) inference procedure predicts that the log-log slope of the species-area relationship (SAR) at any spatial scale is a specified function of the ratio of abundance, N(A), to species richness, S(A), at that scale. The theory thus predicts, in generally good agreement with observation, that all SARs collapse onto a specified universal curve when local slope, z(A), is plotted against N(A)/S(A). A recent publication, however, argues that if it is assumed that patterns in macroecology are independent of the taxonomic choices that define assemblages of species, then this principle of "taxon invariance" precludes the MaxEnt-predicted universality of the SAR.

Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere.

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale 'tipping point' highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions.

Shrink and share: humanity's present and future Ecological Footprint.

Sustainability is the possibility of all people living rewarding lives within the means of nature. Despite ample recognition of the importance of achieving sustainable development, exemplified by the Rio Declaration of 1992 and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the global economy fails to meet the most fundamental minimum condition for sustainability--that human demand for ecosystem goods and services remains within the biosphere's total capacity. In 2002, humanity operated in a state of overshoot, demanding over 20% more biological capacity than the Earth's ecosystems could regenerate in that year.

Red algae respond to waves: morphological and mechanical variation in Mastocarpus papillatus along a gradient of force.

Intertidal algae are exposed to the potentially severe drag forces generated by crashing waves, and several species of brown algae respond, in part, by varying the strength of their stipe material. In contrast, previous measurements have suggested that the material strength of red algae is constant across wave exposures. Here, we reexamine the responses to drag of the intertidal red alga Mastocarpus papillatus Kutzing.