All Outputs (67)

sPlot : a new tool for global vegetation analyses (2019)
Journal Article

Questions: Vegetation-plot records provide information on presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers,... Read More about sPlot : a new tool for global vegetation analyses.

A view from above: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide a new tool for assessing liana infestation in tropical forest canopies (2019)
Journal Article

1. Tropical forests store and sequester large quantities of carbon, mitigating climate change. Lianas (woody vines) are important tropical forest components, most conspicuous in the canopy. Lianas reduce forest carbon uptake and their recent incre... Read More about A view from above: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide a new tool for assessing liana infestation in tropical forest canopies.

Global trait–environment relationships of plant communities (2018)
Journal Article

Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from t... Read More about Global trait–environment relationships of plant communities.

A novel dendroecological method finds a non-linear relationship between elevation and seasonal growth continuity on an island with trade wind-influenced water availability (2018)
Journal Article

Climatic seasonality drives ecosystem processes (e.g. productivity) and influences plant species distribution. However, it is poorly understood how different aspects of seasonality (esp. regarding temperature and precipitation) affect growth continui... Read More about A novel dendroecological method finds a non-linear relationship between elevation and seasonal growth continuity on an island with trade wind-influenced water availability.

No empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that daily climate variation has an effect on species’ elevational range size: Reply to Chan et al. (2018)
Journal Article

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Following our critique, Chan etal. defend the approach used in their original paper. They reveal their “iterative strategy of SEM” (structural equationmodelling), which they claim is “standard” (we show otherwise) and “... Read More about No empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that daily climate variation has an effect on species’ elevational range size: Reply to Chan et al..

Models of upland species’ distributions are improved by accounting for geodiversity (2018)
Journal Article

Context: Recent research suggests that novel geodiversity data on landforms, hydrology and surface materials can improve biodiversity models at the landscape scale by quantifying abiotic variability more effectively than commonly used measures of spa... Read More about Models of upland species’ distributions are improved by accounting for geodiversity.

Refining area of occupancy to address the modifiable areal unit problem in ecology and conservation (2018)
Journal Article

© 2018 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. The modifiable areal unit problem is prevalent across many aspects of spatial analysis within ecology and conservation. The p... Read More about Refining area of occupancy to address the modifiable areal unit problem in ecology and conservation.

Uniqueness of protected areas for conservation strategies in the European Union (2018)
Journal Article

Protected areas (PAs) constitute major tools in nature conservation. In the European Union (EU), the Birds and Habitats Directives are the most important policies for conservation strategy, legally preserving Europe’s characteristic, rare, endemic an... Read More about Uniqueness of protected areas for conservation strategies in the European Union.

Demanding the impossible: a strike zine (2018)
Other

A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms.

Phylogenetic classification of the world’s tropical forests (2018)
Journal Article

Knowledge about the biogeographic affinities of the world’s tropical forests helps to better understand regional differences in forest structure, diversity, composition, and dynamics. Such understanding will enable anticipation of region-specific res... Read More about Phylogenetic classification of the world’s tropical forests.

The incidence function model as a tool for landscape ecological impact assessments (2017)
Journal Article

Landscape-scale approaches to assessing the impact of land-use change on species' persistence are necessary because species depend on processes acting at varying scales, yet existing approaches to ecological impact assessment tend only to be site-bas... Read More about The incidence function model as a tool for landscape ecological impact assessments.

Does daily climate variation have an effect on species’ elevational range size? (2017)
Journal Article

In their recent paper published in Science (2016, 351, 1437–1439), Chan et al. analysed 137 montane gradients, concluding that they found a novel pattern—a negative relationship between mean elevational range size of species and daily temperature var... Read More about Does daily climate variation have an effect on species’ elevational range size?.

Scrubbing up: multi-scale investigation of woody encroachment in a southern African savannah (2017)
Journal Article

Changes in the extent of woody vegetation represent a major conservation question in many savannah systems around the globe. To address the problem of the current lack of broad-scale cost-effective tools for land cover monitoring in complex savannah... Read More about Scrubbing up: multi-scale investigation of woody encroachment in a southern African savannah.

Spatial relationship between biodiversity and geodiversity across a gradient of land-use intensity in high-latitude landscapes (2017)
Journal Article

Context: ‘Conserving Nature’s stage’ has been advanced as an important conservation principle because of known links between biodiversity and abiotic environmental diversity, especially in sensitive high-latitude environments and at the landscape sca... Read More about Spatial relationship between biodiversity and geodiversity across a gradient of land-use intensity in high-latitude landscapes.

Metapopulation modelling of long-term urban habitat-loss scenarios (2017)
Journal Article

Context: Increasing human populations in urban areas pose a threat to species’ persistence through habitat loss and fragmentation. It is therefore essential that we develop methods to investigate critical habitat loss thresholds and least detrimental... Read More about Metapopulation modelling of long-term urban habitat-loss scenarios.

Modelling native and alien vascular plant species richness: at which scales is geodiversity most relevant? (2017)
Journal Article

Aim: To explore the scale-dependency of relationships between novel geodiversity measures and 26 both native and alien vascular plant species richness. Location: Great Britain Time period: Data collected 1995-2015 Major taxa: Vascular plants Meth... Read More about Modelling native and alien vascular plant species richness: at which scales is geodiversity most relevant?.

Conservation on the blink: deficient technical reports threaten conservation in the Natura 2000 network (2017)
Journal Article

Combining geodiversity with climate and topography to account for threatened species richness (2016)
Journal Article

Improved understanding of threatened species diversity is important for long-term conservation planning and natural area management, especially under ongoing global change. Geodiversity – the diversity of earth surface materials, forms and processes... Read More about Combining geodiversity with climate and topography to account for threatened species richness.

Topography-driven isolation, speciation and a global increase of endemism with elevation (2016)
Journal Article

Aim: Higher-elevation areas on islands and continental mountains tend to be separated by longer distances, predicting higher endemism at higher elevations; our study is the first to test the generality of the predicted pattern. We also compare it emp... Read More about Topography-driven isolation, speciation and a global increase of endemism with elevation.

New directions in island biogeography (2016)
Journal Article

Aim: Much of our current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes comes from island research. With the increasing availability of data on distributions and phylogenetic relationships and new analytical approaches to understanding the pr... Read More about New directions in island biogeography.