Evaluating ecosystem protection and fragmentation of the world's major mountain regions.

Conserving mountains is important for protecting biodiversity because they have high beta diversity and endemicity, facilitate species movement, and provide numerous ecosystem benefits for people. Mountains are often thought to have lower levels of human modification and contain more protected area than surrounding lowlands. To examine this, we compared biogeographic attributes of the largest, contiguous, mountainous region on each continent.

Ecological filtering shapes the impacts of agricultural deforestation on biodiversity.

The biodiversity impacts of agricultural deforestation vary widely across regions. Previous efforts to explain this variation have focused exclusively on the landscape features and management regimes of agricultural systems, neglecting the potentially critical role of ecological filtering in shaping deforestation tolerance of extant species assemblages at large geographical scales via selection for functional traits. Here we provide a large-scale test of this role using a global database of species abundance ratios between matched agricultural and native forest sites that comprises 71 avian assemblages reported in 44 primary studies, and a companion database of 10 functional traits for all 2,647 species involved.

Mapping multiscale breeding bird species distributions across the United States and evaluating their conservation applications.

Species distribution models are vital to management decisions that require understanding habitat use patterns, particularly for species of conservation concern. However, the production of distribution maps for individual species is often hampered by data scarcity, and existing species maps are rarely spatially validated due to limited occurrence data. Furthermore, community-level maps based on stacked species distribution models lack important community assemblage information (e.

Global distribution and climatic controls of natural mountain treelines.

Mountain treelines are thought to be sensitive to climate change. However, how climate impacts mountain treelines is not yet fully understood as treelines may also be affected by other human activities. Here, we focus on "closed-loop" mountain treelines (CLMT) that completely encircle a mountain and are less likely to have been influenced by human land-use change.

Beyond "greening" and "browning": Trends in grassland ground cover fractions across Eurasia that account for spatial and temporal autocorrelation.

Grassland ecosystems cover up to 40% of the global land area and provide many ecosystem services directly supporting the livelihoods of over 1 billion people. Monitoring long-term changes in grasslands is crucial for food security, biodiversity conservation, achieving Land Degradation Neutrality goals, and modeling the global carbon budget. Although long-term grassland monitoring using remote sensing is extensive, it is typically based on a single vegetation index and does not account for temporal and spatial autocorrelation, which means that some trends are falsely identified while others are missed.

Mapping breeding bird species richness at management-relevant resolutions across the United States.

Human activities alter ecosystems everywhere, causing rapid biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization. These losses necessitate coordinated conservation actions guided by biodiversity and species distribution spatial data that cover large areas yet have fine-enough resolution to be management-relevant (i.e.

Accelerated shifts in terrestrial life zones under rapid climate change.

Rapid climate change is impacting biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human well-being. Though the magnitude and trajectory of climate change are becoming clearer, our understanding of how these changes reshape terrestrial life zones-distinct biogeographic units characterized by biotemperature, precipitation, and aridity representing broad-scale ecosystem types-is limited. To address this gap, we used high-resolution historical climatologies and climate projections to determine the global distribution of historical (1901-1920), contemporary (1979-2013), and future (2061-2080) life zones.

Keeping pace with climate change in global terrestrial protected areas.

Protected areas (PAs) are essential to biodiversity conservation, but their static boundaries may undermine their potential for protecting species under climate change. We assessed how the climatic conditions within global terrestrial PAs may change over time. By 2070, protection is expected to decline in cold and warm climates and increase in cool and hot climates over a wide range of precipitation.

Habitat heterogeneity captured by 30-m resolution satellite image texture predicts bird richness across the United States.

Species loss is occurring globally at unprecedented rates, and effective conservation planning requires an understanding of landscape characteristics that determine biodiversity patterns. Habitat heterogeneity is an important determinant of species diversity, but is difficult to measure across large areas using field-based methods that are costly and logistically challenging. Satellite image texture analysis offers a cost-effective alternative for quantifying habitat heterogeneity across broad spatial scales.

Topography and human pressure in mountain ranges alter expected species responses to climate change.

Climate change is leading to widespread elevational shifts thought to increase species extinction risk in mountains. We integrate digital elevation models with a metric of human pressure to examine changes in the amount of intact land area available for species undergoing elevational range shifts in all major mountain ranges globally (n = 1010). Nearly 60% of mountainous area is under intense human pressure, predominantly at low elevations and mountain bases.

Conserving Himalayan birds in highly seasonal forested and agricultural landscapes.

The Himalayas are a global biodiversity hotspot threatened by widespread agriculture and pasture expansion. To determine the impact of these threats on biodiversity and to formulate appropriate conservation strategies, we surveyed birds along elevational gradients in primary forest and in human-dominated lands spanning a gradient of habitat alteration, including forest-agriculture mosaics, mixed agriculture mosaics, and pasture. We surveyed birds during the breeding season and in winter to account for pronounced seasonal migrations.

Global patterns of protection of elevational gradients in mountain ranges.

Protected areas (PAs) that span elevational gradients enhance protection for taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity and facilitate species range shifts under climate change. We quantified the global protection of elevational gradients by analyzing the elevational distributions of 44,155 PAs in 1,010 mountain ranges using the highest resolution digital elevation models available. We show that, on average, mountain ranges in Africa and Asia have the lowest elevational protection, ranges in Europe and South America have intermediate elevational protection, and ranges in North America and Oceania have the highest elevational protection.

The spatial and temporal domains of modern ecology.

To understand ecological phenomena, it is necessary to observe their behaviour across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Since this need was first highlighted in the 1980s, technology has opened previously inaccessible scales to observation. To help to determine whether there have been corresponding changes in the scales observed by modern ecologists, we analysed the resolution, extent, interval and duration of observations (excluding experiments) in 348 studies that have been published between 2004 and 2014.

Temperature and competition interact to structure Himalayan bird communities.

Longstanding theory predicts that competitive interactions set species' range limits in relatively aseasonal, species-rich regions, while temperature limits distributions in more seasonal, species-poor areas. More recent theory holds that species evolve narrow physiological tolerances in aseasonal regions, with temperature being an important determining factor in such zones. We tested how abiotic (temperature) and biotic (competition) factors set range limits and structure bird communities along strong, opposing, temperature-seasonality and species-richness gradients in the Himalayas, in two regions separated by 1500 km.

The role of competition, ecotones, and temperature in the elevational distribution of Himalayan birds.

There is clear evidence that species' ranges along environmental gradients are constrained by both biotic and abiotic factors, yet their relative importance in structuring realized distributions remains uncertain. We surveyed breeding bird communities while collecting in situ temperature and vegetation data along five elevational transects in the Himalayas differing in temperature variability, habitat zonation, and bird richness in order to disentangle temperature, habitat, and congeneric competition as mechanisms structuring elevational ranges. Our results from species' abundance models representing these three mechanisms differed markedly from previous, foundational research in the tropics.

The importance of agricultural lands for Himalayan birds in winter.

The impacts of land-use change on biodiversity in the Himalayas are poorly known, notwithstanding widespread deforestation and agricultural intensification in this highly biodiverse region. Although intact primary forests harbor many Himalayan birds during breeding, a large number of bird species use agricultural lands during winter. We assessed how Himalayan bird species richness, abundance, and composition during winter are affected by forest loss stemming from agriculture and grazing.

Trade-offs between savanna woody plant diversity and carbon storage in the Brazilian Cerrado.

Incentivizing carbon storage can be a win-win pathway to conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. In savannas, however, the situation is more complex. Promoting carbon storage through woody encroachment may reduce plant diversity of savanna endemics, even as the diversity of encroaching forest species increases.

Accelerated human population growth at protected area edges.

Protected areas (PAs) have long been criticized as creations of and for an elite few, where associated costs, but few benefits, are borne by marginalized rural communities. Contrary to predictions of this argument, we found that average human population growth rates on the borders of 306 PAs in 45 countries in Africa and Latin America were nearly double average rural growth, suggesting that PAs attract, rather than repel, human settlement. Higher population growth on PA edges is evident across ecoregions, countries, and continents and is correlated positively with international donor investment in national conservation programs and an index of park-related funding.