Evidence of thermophilization in Afromontane forests.

Thermophilization is the directional change in species community composition towards greater relative abundances of species associated with warmer environments. This process is well-documented in temperate and Neotropical plant communities, but it is uncertain whether this phenomenon occurs elsewhere in the tropics. Here we extend the search for thermophilization to equatorial Africa, where lower tree diversity compared to other tropical forest regions and different biogeographic history could affect community responses to climate change.

Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential.

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these estimates. Here we combine several ground-sourced and satellite-derived approaches to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands.

The global biogeography of tree leaf form and habit.

Understanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, evergreen and deciduous trees. To address these gaps, we conducted a global, ground-sourced assessment of forest leaf-type variation by integrating forest inventory data with comprehensive leaf form (broadleaf vs needle-leaf) and habit (evergreen vs deciduous) records.

Native diversity buffers against severity of non-native tree invasions.

Determining the drivers of non-native plant invasions is critical for managing native ecosystems and limiting the spread of invasive species. Tree invasions in particular have been relatively overlooked, even though they have the potential to transform ecosystems and economies. Here, leveraging global tree databases, we explore how the phylogenetic and functional diversity of native tree communities, human pressure and the environment influence the establishment of non-native tree species and the subsequent invasion severity.

Occurrence dynamics of mammals in protected tropical forests respond to human presence and activities.

Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in wildlife conservation. Nonetheless there is concern and uncertainty regarding how and at what spatial scales anthropogenic stressors influence the occurrence dynamics of wildlife populations inside PAs. Here we assessed how anthropogenic stressors influence occurrence dynamics of 159 mammal species in 16 tropical PAs from three biogeographic regions.

A dataset of occurrence of wild bees and their interaction with foraging plants along a livestock grazing gradient of northern Tanzania.

A dataset describing the occurrence of wild bees and their interaction with forage plants along livestock grazing gradient is critical in understanding bee-plant interaction networks and in developing conservation plans to ensure ecosystem services in human-modified landscapes. Despite this need, bee-plant datasets are scarce in Africa, and Tanzania is no exception. Therefore, in this article, we present a dataset of wild bee species richness, occurrence, and distribution collected across sites with different levels of livestock grazing intensity and forage resources thereby.

Consistent diel activity patterns of forest mammals among tropical regions.

An animal's daily use of time (their "diel activity") reflects their adaptations, requirements, and interactions, yet we know little about the underlying processes governing diel activity within and among communities. Here we examine whether community-level activity patterns differ among biogeographic regions, and explore the roles of top-down versus bottom-up processes and thermoregulatory constraints. Using data from systematic camera-trap networks in 16 protected forests across the tropics, we examine the relationships of mammals' diel activity to body mass and trophic guild.

Occupancy winners in tropical protected forests: a pantropical analysis.

The structure of forest mammal communities appears surprisingly consistent across the continental tropics, presumably due to convergent evolution in similar environments. Whether such consistency extends to mammal occupancy, despite variation in species characteristics and context, remains unclear. Here we ask whether we can predict occupancy patterns and, if so, whether these relationships are consistent across biogeographic regions.

A synopsis of the Bee occurrence data of northern Tanzania.

Background: Bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) are the most important group of pollinators with about 20,507 known species worldwide. Despite the critical role of bees in providing pollination services, studies aiming at understanding which species are present across disturbance gradients are scarce. Limited taxononomic information for the existing and unidentified bee species in Tanzania make their conservation haphazard.

Regulating Innovation: Utility vs. Leisure in Swedish Moped History, 1952-1961.

This article investigates the attempts to regulate innovation in Sweden's road traffic system, specifically small, two-wheeled motorized vehicles or mopeds. Regulators wanted to establish a definition of the moped as a utility vehicle. Moped users and producers challenged their intentions, envisioning the moped as a vehicle for leisure.

Sustainable Urban Mobility in the Present, Past, and Future.

Making urban mobility more sustainable is a grand challenge, yet urban environments are beacons of hope in delivering this result: authorities are active partners in the mobility transition, and dense cities provide favorable boundary conditions for delivering more sustainable outcomes. A U-turn to the past may present the right recipe for such a mobility transition to take place by making the past "usable." First, this entails understanding how our currently unsustainable urban mobility has been advocated and how alternative urban mobilities have been decentered.

Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests.

The biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) is foundational to our understanding of the global extinction crisis and its impacts on ecosystem functioning. Understanding BPR is critical for the accurate valuation and effective conservation of biodiversity. Using ground-sourced data from 777,126 permanent plots, spanning 44 countries and most terrestrial biomes, we reveal a globally consistent positive concave-down BPR, showing that continued biodiversity loss would result in an accelerating decline in forest productivity worldwide.

Limited carbon and biodiversity co-benefits for tropical forest mammals and birds.

The conservation of tropical forest carbon stocks offers the opportunity to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and simultaneously conserve biodiversity. However, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which carbon stock conservation will provide benefits to biodiversity in part because whether forests that contain high carbon density in their aboveground biomass also contain high animal diversity is unknown. Here, we empirically examined medium to large bodied ground-dwelling mammal and bird (hereafter "wildlife") diversity and carbon stock levels within the tropics using camera trap and vegetation data from a pantropical network of sites.

Standardized Assessment of Biodiversity Trends in Tropical Forest Protected Areas: The End Is Not in Sight.

Extinction rates in the Anthropocene are three orders of magnitude higher than background and disproportionately occur in the tropics, home of half the world's species. Despite global efforts to combat tropical species extinctions, lack of high-quality, objective information on tropical biodiversity has hampered quantitative evaluation of conservation strategies. In particular, the scarcity of population-level monitoring in tropical forests has stymied assessment of biodiversity outcomes, such as the status and trends of animal populations in protected areas.

An estimate of the number of tropical tree species.

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the minimum number of tropical forest tree species to fall between ∼ 40,000 and ∼ 53,000, i.e.

Estimating species richness and modelling habitat preferences of tropical forest mammals from camera trap data.

Medium-to-large mammals within tropical forests represent a rich and functionally diversified component of this biome; however, they continue to be threatened by hunting and habitat loss. Assessing these communities implies studying species' richness and composition, and determining a state variable of species abundance in order to infer changes in species distribution and habitat associations. The Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network fills a chronic gap in standardized data collection by implementing a systematic monitoring framework of biodiversity, including mammal communities, across several sites.

Community structure and diversity of tropical forest mammals: data from a global camera trap network.

Terrestrial mammals are a key component of tropical forest communities as indicators of ecosystem health and providers of important ecosystem services. However, there is little quantitative information about how they change with local, regional and global threats. In this paper, the first standardized pantropical forest terrestrial mammal community study, we examine several aspects of terrestrial mammal species and community diversity (species richness, species diversity, evenness, dominance, functional diversity and community structure) at seven sites around the globe using a single standardized camera trapping methodology approach.