Snakebite Treatment in Tanzania: Identifying Gaps in Community Practices and Hospital Resources.

Snakebite envenoming causes more than 140,000 deaths annually and at least triple this number of disabilities. The World Health Organization classified snakebite as a Neglected Tropical Disease in 2017 and developed a strategy to halve death and disability from snakebite by 2030. To achieve this goal, snakebite victims need to receive safe and effective treatment.

Species richness is more important for ecosystem functioning than species turnover along an elevational gradient.

Many experiments have shown that biodiversity enhances ecosystem functioning. However, we have little understanding of how environmental heterogeneity shapes the effect of diversity on ecosystem functioning and to what extent this diversity effect is mediated by variation in species richness or species turnover. This knowledge is crucial to scaling up the results of experiments from local to regional scales.

Direct and plant-mediated effects of climate on bird diversity in tropical mountains.

Aim: Although patterns of biodiversity across the globe are well studied, there is still a controversial debate about the underlying mechanisms and their generality across biogeographic scales. In particular, it is unclear to what extent diversity patterns along environmental gradients are directly driven by abiotic factors, such as climate, or indirectly mediated through biotic factors, such as resource effects on consumers.

Location: Andes, Southern Ecuador; Mt.

Climate-land-use interactions shape tropical mountain biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

Agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources have transformed tropical mountain ecosystems across the world, and the consequences of these transformations for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are largely unknown. Conclusions that are derived from studies in non-mountainous areas are not suitable for predicting the effects of land-use changes on tropical mountains because the climatic environment rapidly changes with elevation, which may mitigate or amplify the effects of land use. It is of key importance to understand how the interplay of climate and land use constrains biodiversity and ecosystem functions to determine the consequences of global change for mountain ecosystems.

Plant and animal functional diversity drive mutualistic network assembly across an elevational gradient.

Species' functional traits set the blueprint for pair-wise interactions in ecological networks. Yet, it is unknown to what extent the functional diversity of plant and animal communities controls network assembly along environmental gradients in real-world ecosystems. Here we address this question with a unique dataset of mutualistic bird-fruit, bird-flower and insect-flower interaction networks and associated functional traits of 200 plant and 282 animal species sampled along broad climate and land-use gradients on Mt.