Publications by authors named "L Tronstad"
Article Synopsis
- * Concerns about wildlife mortality, particularly birds and bats, have been widely studied, but there is limited understanding of how wind turbines impact insects, which make up a larger biomass.
- * A review of existing research indicates that turbine location, design, and heat output may attract insects, which could then lead to fatalities of insect-eating animals, highlighting the need for further study and a risk assessment tool for monitoring insect populations near wind facilities.
Diet plasticity is a common behavior exhibited by piscivores to sustain predator biomass when preferred prey biomass is reduced. Invasive piscivore diet plasticity could complicate suppression success; thus, understanding invasive predator consumption is insightful to meeting conservation targets. Here, we determine if diet plasticity exists in an invasive apex piscivore and whether plasticity could influence native species recovery benchmarks and invasive species suppression goals.
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- The decline in global biodiversity is not just affecting rare species, but also impacting common species like the western bumble bee, which has seen a significant drop in population across North America.
- Research used extensive data to analyze the influence of climate, land use, and pesticide application on the bumble bee's occupancy from 1998 to 2020, revealing strong negative impacts from higher temperatures, droughts, and neonicotinoids.
- The findings predict a staggering mean occupancy decline of 57% overall, with severe drops expected in nearly half of the ecoregions by the 2050s, highlighting the urgent need for enhanced species monitoring and data integration to understand and address these declines.
Mountains are global biodiversity hotspots where cold environments and their associated ecological communities are threatened by climate warming. Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the ecological effects of alpine glacier and snowfield recession. However, much less attention has been given to identifying climate refugia in mountain ecosystems where present-day environmental conditions will be maintained, at least in the near-term, as other habitats change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRapid glacier recession is altering the physical conditions of headwater streams. Stream temperatures are predicted to rise and become increasingly variable, putting entire meltwater-associated biological communities at risk of extinction. Thus, there is a pressing need to understand how thermal stress affects mountain stream insects, particularly where glaciers are likely to vanish on contemporary timescales.
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