Surveying lichen diversity in forests: A comparison of expert mapping and eDNA metabarcoding of bark surfaces.

Lichens are an important part of forest ecosystems, contributing to forest biodiversity, the formation of micro-niches and nutrient cycling. Assessing the diversity of lichenised fungi in complex ecosystems, such as forests, requires time and substantial skills in collecting and identifying lichens. The completeness of inventories thus largely depends on the expertise of the collector, time available for the survey and size of the studied area.

Direct and plant-mediated effects of climate on bird diversity in tropical mountains.

Aim: Although patterns of biodiversity across the globe are well studied, there is still a controversial debate about the underlying mechanisms and their generality across biogeographic scales. In particular, it is unclear to what extent diversity patterns along environmental gradients are directly driven by abiotic factors, such as climate, or indirectly mediated through biotic factors, such as resource effects on consumers.

Location: Andes, Southern Ecuador; Mt.

Detection and annotation of plant organs from digitised herbarium scans using deep learning.

As herbarium specimens are increasingly becoming digitised and accessible in online repositories, advanced computer vision techniques are being used to extract information from them. The presence of certain plant organs on herbarium sheets is useful information in various scientific contexts and automatic recognition of these organs will help mobilise such information. In our study, we use deep learning to detect plant organs on digitised herbarium specimens with Faster R-CNN.

Similar factors underlie tree abundance in forests in native and alien ranges.

Aim: Alien plant species can cause severe ecological and economic problems, and therefore attract a lot of research interest in biogeography and related fields. To identify potential future invasive species, we need to better understand the mechanisms underlying the abundances of invasive tree species in their new ranges, and whether these mechanisms differ between their native and alien ranges. Here, we test two hypotheses: that greater relative abundance is promoted by (a) functional difference from locally co-occurring trees, and (b) higher values than locally co-occurring trees for traits linked to competitive ability.