Publications by authors named "Luda Paul"
Advances in tracking technology have helped elucidate the movements of the planet's largest and most mobile species, but these animals do not represent faunal diversity as a whole. Tracking a more diverse array of animal species will enable testing of broad ecological and evolutionary hypotheses and aid conservation efforts. Small and sedentary species of the tropics make up a huge part of earth's animal diversity and are therefore key to this endeavor.
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- Haemosporidians are common bird parasites that affect host fitness, and their impact varies across different spatial scales (local to global).
- The study investigates how both abiotic factors (like temperature and forest structure) and the ecological context (canopy vs. understory) influence haemosporidian prevalence in birds in Papua New Guinea's fragmented and continuous forests.
- The findings indicate that infection levels are higher in specific bird habitats (canopy), and suggest that different bird species experience varying parasite pressures based on their environment and community interactions.
Tropical mountains harbor exceptional concentrations of Earth's biodiversity. In topographically complex landscapes, montane species typically inhabit multiple mountainous regions, but are absent in intervening lowland environments. Here we report a comparative analysis of genome-wide DNA polymorphism data for population pairs from eighteen Indo-Pacific bird species from the Moluccan islands of Buru and Seram and from across the island of New Guinea.
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- The study focuses on plant and bird communities in a 50 ha lowland rainforest plot in Papua New Guinea, highlighting a gap in research at the intermediate scale of tens to thousands of kilometers.
- Woody plant species richness was found to be lower in the smaller plot, comprising 88% of the richness recorded in the larger 10,000 ha area, whereas bird communities showed similar diversity patterns between the two scales.
- The findings suggest that a 50 ha plot can effectively represent broader diversity and community composition, especially for birds, which suggests the potential for broader data application from these types of studies in lowland tropical forests.