Science Enabled by Specimen Data

Wan, J.-Z., Z.-X. Zhang, and C.-J. Wang. 2018. Identifying potential distributions of 10 invasive alien trees: implications for conservation management of protected areas. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-018-7104-6

Tree invasion has the potential to negatively affect biodiversity and ecosystems, with invasive alien trees (IATs) expanding widely in protected areas (PAs) across different habitats. Thus, the effectiveness of PAs might be reduced. Investigation of the distributions of IAT is urgently required to i…

Wan, J.-Z., C.-J. Wang, and F.-H. Yu. 2019. Large-scale environmental niche variation between clonal and non-clonal plant species: Roles of clonal growth organs and ecoregions. Science of The Total Environment 652: 1071–1076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.10.280

Clonal plant species can produce genetically identical and potentially independent offspring, and dominate a variety of habitats. The divergent evolutionary mechanisms between clonal and non-clonal plants are interesting areas of ecological research. A number of studies have shown that the environme…

Milla, R., J. M. Bastida, M. M. Turcotte, G. Jones, C. Violle, C. P. Osborne, J. Chacón-Labella, et al. 2018. Phylogenetic patterns and phenotypic profiles of the species of plants and mammals farmed for food. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 1808–1817. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0690-4

The origins of agriculture were key events in human history, during which people came to depend for their food on small numbers of animal and plant species. However, the biological traits determining which species were domesticated for food provision, and which were not, are unclear. Here, we invest…

Inman, R., J. Franklin, T. Esque, and K. Nussear. 2018. Spatial sampling bias in the Neotoma paleoecological archives affects species paleo-distribution models. Quaternary Science Reviews 198: 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.08.015

The ability to infer paleo-distributions with limited knowledge of absence makes species distribution modeling (SDM) a useful tool for exploring paleobiogeographic questions. Spatial sampling bias is a known issue when modeling extant species. Here we quantify the spatial sampling bias in a North Am…

Joffard, N., F. Massol, M. Grenié, C. Montgelard, and B. Schatz. 2018. Effect of pollination strategy, phylogeny and distribution on pollination niches of Euro‐Mediterranean orchids I. Bartomeus [ed.],. Journal of Ecology 107: 478–490. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13013

1.Pollination niches are important components of ecological niches and have played a major role in the diversification of Angiosperms. In this study, we focused on Euro‐Mediterranean orchids, which use diverse pollination strategies and interact with various functional groups of insects. In these or…

Petersen, K. B., and M. Burd. 2018. The adaptive value of heterospory: Evidence from Selaginella. Evolution 72: 1080–1091. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13484

Heterospory was a pivotal evolutionary innovation for land plants, but it has never been clear why it evolved. We used the geographic distributions of 114 species of the heterosporous lycophyte Selaginella to explore the functional ecology of microspore and megaspore size, traits that would be corre…