Science Enabled
Cross, A. T., T. A. Krueger, P. M. Gonella, A. S. Robinson, and A. S. Fleischmann. 2020. Conservation of carnivorous plants in the age of extinction. Global Ecology and Conservation 24: e01272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01272
Carnivorous plants (CPs)—those possessing specific strategies to attract, capture and kill animal prey and obtain nutrition through the absorption of their biomass—are harbingers of anthropogenic degradation and destruction of ecosystems. CPs exhibit highly specialised and often very sensitive ecolo…
Chevalier, M., B. M. Chase, L. J. Quick, L. M. Dupont, and T. C. Johnson. 2020. Temperature change in subtropical southeastern Africa during the past 790,000 yr. Geology 49: 71–75. https://doi.org/10.1130/G47841.1
Across the glacial-interglacial cycles of the late Pleistocene (~700 k.y.), temperature variability at low latitudes is often considered to have been negligible compared to changes in precipitation. However, a paucity of quantified temperature records makes this difficult to reliably assess. In this…
de Jesús Hernández-Hernández, M., J. A. Cruz, and C. Castañeda-Posadas. 2020. Paleoclimatic and vegetation reconstruction of the miocene southern Mexico using fossil flowers. Journal of South American Earth Sciences 104: 102827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsames.2020.102827
Concern about the course of the current environmental problems has raised interest in investigating the different scenarios that have taken place in our planet throughout time. To that end, different methodologies have been employed in order to determine the different variables that compose the envi…
Wierzcholska, S., M. K. Dyderski, and A. M. Jagodziński. 2020. Potential distribution of an epiphytic bryophyte depends on climate and forest continuity. Global and Planetary Change 193: 103270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2020.103270
Woodland-specialist epiphytic bryophytes are both a threatened ecological guild of forest species as well as a precise bioindicator of conservation value of forest ecosystems. However, due to lack of data on distribution, there is no information about their potential reaction to predicted climate ch…
Medina, A. M., and M. Almeida-Neto. 2020. Grinnelian and Eltonian niche conservatism of the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) in its exotic distribution. Sociobiology 67: 239. https://doi.org/10.13102/sociobiology.v67i2.4901
The understanding of how niche-related traits change during species invasion have prompted what is now known as the niche conservatism principle. Most studies that have tested the niche conservatism principle have focused on the extent to which the species’ climatic niches remain stable in their exo…
Speed, J. D. M., G. Austrheim, M. Bendiksby, A. L. Kolstad, and K. E. M. Vuorinen. 2020. Increasing Cervidae populations have variable impacts on habitat suitability for threatened forest plant and lichen species. Forest Ecology and Management 473: 118286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118286
Large herbivores play a key role in temperate and boreal forest ecosystems. Cervidae (deer) population densities and community structure have undergone drastic changes in many parts of the world over the past decades, often with deer populations increasing. Many studies show impacts of Cervidae on m…
Liu, X., T. M. Blackburn, T. Song, X. Wang, C. Huang, and Y. Li. 2020. Animal invaders threaten protected areas worldwide. Nature Communications 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16719-2
Protected areas are the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. However, alien species invasion is an increasing threat to biodiversity, and the extent to which protected areas worldwide are resistant to incursions of alien species remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate establishment by 8…
van Treuren, R., R. Hoekstra, R. Wehrens, and T. van Hintum. 2020. Effects of climate change on the distribution of crop wild relatives in the Netherlands in relation to conservation status and ecotope variation. Global Ecology and Conservation 23: e01054. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01054
Crop wild relatives (CWR) are wild plant taxa that are genetically related to a cultivated species and are considered rich sources of useful traits for crop improvement. CWR are generally underrepresented in genebanks, while their survival in nature is not guaranteed. Inventories and risk analyses a…
Goodwin, Z. A., P. Muñoz-Rodríguez, D. J. Harris, T. Wells, J. R. I. Wood, D. Filer, and R. W. Scotland. 2020. How long does it take to discover a species? Systematics and Biodiversity 18: 784–793. https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2020.1751339
The description of a new species is a key step in cataloguing the World’s flora. However, this is only a preliminary stage in a long process of understanding what that species represents. We investigated how long the species discovery process takes by focusing on three key stages: 1, the collection …
Klages, J. P., U. Salzmann, T. Bickert, C.-D. Hillenbrand, K. Gohl, G. Kuhn, et al. 2020. Temperate rainforests near the South Pole during peak Cretaceous warmth. Nature 580: 81–86. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2148-5
The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years1,2,3,4,5, driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume6. In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether p…