Plantation management to restore early and late-successional bird habitat under various climatic and seasonal conditions.

Although agriculture and plantation forestry have decreased natural open habitats and old-growth forests, conservation in managed lands is considered essential for achieving "nature-positive" goals that reverse biodiversity trends from negative to positive. From subboreal to temperate regions, mature conifer plantations with broadleaved trees (BLTs) offer suitable habitats for species preferring mature natural BLT forests, whereas young plantations harbor species depending on early successional (ES) habitats. However, the functional forms of stand age and BLT, and their context dependency, remain unknown.

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.

Sharing land via keystone structure: Retaining naturally regenerated trees may efficiently benefit birds in plantations.

Meeting food/wood demands with increasing human population and per-capita consumption is a pressing conservation issue, and is often framed as a choice between land sparing and land sharing. Although most empirical studies comparing the efficacy of land sparing and sharing supported land sparing, land sharing may be more efficient if its performance is tested by rigorous experimental design and habitat structures providing crucial resources for various species-keystone structures-are clearly involved. We launched a manipulative experiment to retain naturally regenerated broad-leaved trees when harvesting conifer plantations in central Hokkaido, northern Japan.

Quantifying the impacts of 166 years of land cover change on lowland bird communities.

Land cover change for agriculture is thought to be a major threat to global biodiversity. However, its ecological impact has rarely been quantified in the Northern Hemisphere, as broad-scale conversion to farmland mainly occurred until the 1400s-1700s in the region, limiting the availability of sufficient data. The Ishikari Lowland in Hokkaido, Japan, offers an excellent opportunity to address this issue, as hunter-gatherer lifestyles dominated this region until the mid-nineteenth century and land cover maps are available for the period of land cover changes (i.

Seasonality in spatial distribution: Climate and land use have contrasting effects on the species richness of breeding and wintering birds.

Aim: Many studies have examined large-scale distributions of various taxa and their drivers, emphasizing the importance of climate, topography, and land use. Most studies have dealt with distributions over a single season or annually without considering seasonality. However, animal distributions and their drivers can differ among seasons because many animals migrate to suitable climates and areas with abundant prey resources.

A spatially explicit empirical model of structural development processes in natural forests based on climate and topography.

Stand structure develops with stand age. Old-growth forests with well-developed stand structure support many species. However, development rates of stand structure likely vary with climate and topography.

Genomic reconstruction of 100 000-year grassland history in a forested country: population dynamics of specialist forbs.

Grassland ecosystems worldwide have been extensively converted to other land uses and are globally imperiled. Because many grasslands have been maintained by human activities, understanding their origin and history is fundamentally important to better contemporary management. However, existing methods to reconstruct past vegetation can produce contrasting views on grassland history.

Analyzing community structure subject to incomplete sampling: hierarchical community model vs. canonical ordinations.

Recently developing hierarchical community models (HCMs) accounting for incomplete sampling are promising approaches to understand community organization. However, pros and cons of incorporating incomplete sampling in the analysis and related design issues remain unknown. In this study, we compared HCM and canonical redundancy analysis (RDA) carried out with 10 different dissimilarity coefficients to evaluate how each approach restores true community abundance data sampled with imperfect detection.

Health Benefits of Urban Allotment Gardening: Improved Physical and Psychological Well-Being and Social Integration.

With an ever-increasing urban population, promoting public health and well-being in towns and cities is a major challenge. Previous research has suggested that participating in allotment gardening delivers a wide range of health benefits. However, evidence from quantitative analyses is still scarce.

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project.

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.

Gardening is beneficial for health: A meta-analysis.

There is increasing evidence that gardening provides substantial human health benefits. However, no formal statistical assessment has been conducted to test this assertion. Here, we present the results of a meta-analysis of research examining the effects of gardening, including horticultural therapy, on health.

Estimating species - area relationships by modeling abundance and frequency subject to incomplete sampling.

Models and data used to describe species-area relationships confound sampling with ecological process as they fail to acknowledge that estimates of species richness arise due to sampling. This compromises our ability to make ecological inferences from and about species-area relationships. We develop and illustrate hierarchical community models of abundance and frequency to estimate species richness.

Traffic noise reduces foraging efficiency in wild owls.

Anthropogenic noise has been increasing globally. Laboratory experiments suggest that noise disrupts foraging behavior across a range of species, but to reveal the full impacts of noise, we must examine the impacts of noise on foraging behavior among species in the wild. Owls are widespread nocturnal top predators and use prey rustling sounds for localizing prey when hunting.

The Distribution of Cool Spots as Microrefugia in a Mountainous Area.

It has recently been proposed that microrefugia played an important role in species survival during past climate change events. However, the current distributions of microrefugia remain largely unknown. Wind-hole sites are areas affected by preferential flows of cool air generated in interstitial spaces created by rock fragments or colluvia.

Plantation vs. natural forest: matrix quality determines pollinator abundance in crop fields.

In terrestrial ecosystems, ecological processes and patterns within focal patches frequently depend on their matrix. Crop fields (focal patches) are often surrounded by a mosaic of other land-use types (matrix), which may act as habitats for organisms and differ in terms of the immigration activities of organisms to the fields. We examined whether matrix quality affects wild pollinator abundance in crop fields, given that the species (Apis cerana) generally nest in the cavities of natural trees.

Use of two population metrics clarifies biodiversity dynamics in large-scale monitoring: the case of trees in Japanese old-growth forests: the need for multiple population metrics in large-scale monitoring.

Many indicators/indices provide information on whether the 2010 biodiversity target of reducing declines in biodiversity have been achieved. The strengths and limitations of the various measures used to assess the success of such measures are now being discussed. Biodiversity dynamics are often evaluated by a single biological population metric, such as the abundance of each species.

Relative importance of the area and shape of patches to the diversity of multiple taxa.

Although enhancing reserve shape has been suggested as an alternative to enlarging nature reserves, the importance of reserve shape relative to reserve area remains unclear. Here we examined the relative importance of area and shape of forest patches to species richness, species composition, and species abundance (abundance of each species) for 3 taxa (33 birds, 41 butterflies, and 91 forest-floor plants) in a fragmented landscape in central Hokkaido, northern Japan. We grouped the species according to their potential edge responses (interior-, neutral-, and edge-species groups for birds and forest-floor plants, woodland- and open-land-species groups for butterflies) and analyzed them separately.

Sexual and male horn dimorphism in Copris ochus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae).

Copris ochus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), an endangered species, is the largest dung beetle in Japan. In C. ochus, males have a long head horn, while females lack this long horn (sexual dimorphism).

Flower-visiting behavior of male bees is triggered by nectar-feeding insects.

Bees are important pollinators for many flowering plants. Female bees are thought to be more effective pollinators than male bees because they carry much more pollen than males. Males of some solitary bee species are known to patrol near flowers that females visit.