Rapid and ongoing change creates novelty in ecosystems everywhere, bot when comparing contemporary systems to their historical baselines, and predicted futur systems to the present. However, the level of novelty varies greatly among places. Here w propose a formal and quantifiable definition of abiotic and biotic novelty in ecosystems, ma abiotic novelty globally, and discuss the implications of novelty for the science of ecology an for biodiversity conservation. We define novelty as the degree of dissimilarity of a system measured in one or more dimensions relative to a reference baseline, usually defined as eithe the present or a time window in the past. In this conceptualization, novelty varies in degree, i is multidimensional, can be measured, and requires a temporal and spatial reference. Thi definition moves beyond prior categorical definitions of novel ecosystems, and does no include human agency, self-perpetuation, or irreversibility as criteria. Our global assessment o novelty was based on abiotic factors (temperature, precipitation, and nitrogen deposition) plu human population, and shows that there are already large areas with high novelty toda relative to the early 20th century, and that there will even be more such areas by 2050 Interestingly, the places that are most novel are often not the places where absolute change are largest; highlighting that novelty is inherently different from change. For the ecologica sciences, highly novel ecosystems present new opportunities to test ecological theories, but als challenge the predictive ability of ecological models and their validation. For biodiversit conservation, increasing novelty presents some opportunities, but largely challenges Conservation action is necessary along the entire continuum of novelty, by redoubling effort to protect areas where novelty is low, identifying conservation opportunities where novelty i high, developing flexible yet strong regulations and policies, and establishing long-ter experiments to test management approaches. Meeting the challenge of novelty will requir advances in the science of ecology, and new and creative conservation approaches.
File: Radeloff_Williams_etal_EcoApps2015.pdf
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Land-use change can strongly affect wildlife populations, typically via habitat loss and degradation where land us expands, and also via increasing potentially available habitat where land use ceases. Large mammals are particularl sensitive to land-use change, because they require large tracts of habitat and often depend on habitat outsid protected areas unless protected areas are very large. Our research question was thus how land-use change aroun protected areas affects large mammals' habitat. Russia experienced drastic land-use change after the breakdown o the Soviet Union and – fortunately – wildlife data has been collected continuously throughout this time insid protected areas. We used long-term winter track count data for wild boar (Sus scrofa), moose (Alces alces), an wolf (Canis lupus) to assess habitat change inside and outside of Oksky State Nature Reserve from 1987 to 200 using a time-calibrated species distribution model. Our results showed a constantly high share (at least 89%) of suitabl habitat within the protected area's core zone for each species, yet also substantial habitat increases of up to 23%within the protected buffer zone, and similarly, up to 27% outside the protected area. Of the variables we evaluated post-Soviet land-use change, particularly farmland abandonment, was the main driver of this expansion of potentia habitat for the three species we assessed. Our study highlights that strictly protected areas have been playing an importan role in preserving wildlife in European Russia since 1991, and also that their surroundings provide muc suitable habitat for large mammals. Post-Soviet land-use change in the surroundings of protected areas may provid opportunities to increase and connect wildlife populations.
File: Sieber_etal_2015_BioCons.pdf
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Extreme weather is becoming more pronounced, making phenological patterns les predictable. Among the potential consequences, extreme weather may alter relationships of migrator birds with their seasonal food resources and thus impact valuable ecosystem regulating services (e.g., bir predation of herbivorous insects). Our goal was to quantify the effect of an extremely warm spring on thes relationships in a U.S Midwest oak savanna. Average regional temperatures in the spring of 2009 couple with record highs in 2010 (88C warmer) were the basis of a natural experiment for addressing our goal. I both springs we documented tree flowering and leaf-out phenology, related these to arrival and foragin behavior of the three most abundant migratory wood-warbler species (Parulidae), and quantified the effect of migratory bird foraging on insect density, size, and herbivory using a branch exclosure experiment. I 2009, the dominant tree species at our study site, eastern black oak (Quercus velutina), flowered in mid-Ma and the wood warblers foraged heavily in the savanna during this time. Branches from which birds wer excluded exhibited a trend toward higher insect density, larger Lepidopterans, and greater flower damag than control branches. In 2010, tree phenology was four weeks earlier than in 2009 and the wood warbler were nearly absent from the savanna (83% fewer), likely because peak food availability preceded thei arrival in mid-May. Insect density was 83% greater in 2009 than 2010. However, in 2010, 81% of sample leaves exhibited substantial damage (.25% of leaf-area removed) compared with 27% of leaves in 2009 presumably due to a lack of herbivorous insect regulation by birds. Our results suggest that the extremel warm spring of 2010 altered linkages between migratory birds and their invertebrate prey that are typica during years of average weather, which likely affected habitat use and the delivery of ecosystem regulatin services.
File: Wood&Pidgeon 2015 Ecosphere.pdf
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1. Biodiversity conservation is a primary function of protected areas. However, protected areas also attract people, and therefore, land use has intensified at the boundaries of these lands globally. In the USA, since the 1970s, housing growth at the boundaries (<1 km) of protected areas has increased at a rate far higher than on more distant private lands. Here, we designed our analyses to address our central hypothesis that increasing housing density in and near protected areas will increasingly alter their avian communities 2. We quantified the relationship between abundance and richness of protected-area avian species of greatest conservation need, land-cover affiliates (e.g. species associated with natural land cover such as forest breeders) and synanthropes (e.g. species associated with humans) with housing density on the boundary of protected areas and on more distant private lands from 1970 to 2010 in three ecoregions of the USA. We accomplished this using linear mixed-model analyses, data from the US Census Bureau and 90 routes of the North American Breeding Bird Survey 3. Housing density at the boundary of protected areas tended to be strongly negatively related with the abundance and richness of species of greatest conservation need and land-cover affiliates (upwards of 88% of variance explained) and strongly positively related with synanthropes (upwards of 83% of variance explained). The effect size of these relationships increased in most cases from 1970 to 2010 and was greatest in the densely developed eastern forests. In the more sparsely populated West, we found similar, though weaker, associations 4. Housing density on private lands more distant from protected areas had similar, but more muted negative effects 5. Synthesis and applications. Our results illustrate that as housing density has increased along the boundary of protected areas, the conservation benefit of these lands has likely diminished. We urge conservation planners to prioritize the purchase of private-land inhold-ings in order to maximize the extent of unfragmented natural lands within protected areas. Further, we strongly recommend that land-use planners implement boundary management strategies to alter the pattern of human access to protected areas, cluster development to con-centrate the footprint of rural housing, and establish conservation agreements through local land trusts to buffer protected areas from the effects of development along protected-area boundaries. To maximize the conservation benefit of protected areas, we suggest that housing development should be restricted within 1 km of their boundaries.
File: Wood_et_al-2015-Journal_of_Applied_Ecology.pdf
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Himalayan forests are undergoing rapid changes due to population growth and economic development and their associated bird communities are among the most threatened and least-studied on earth. In the Chinese Himalaya, traditionally managed Tibetan sacred forests are keystone structures for forest bird conservation. Yet, it remains unclear which fine-scale habitat characteristics of the sacred forests are best associated with Himalayan forest bird species. Our goal here was to quantify the relationship between forest habitat characteristics and bird communities in Tibetan sacred forests to understand habitat associations of common forest birds in the Chinese Himalaya. In 2010 and 2011, we conducted bird point counts and habitat surveys at 62, 50-m radius, sample points distributed within and adjacent to six Tibetan sacred forests in northwest Yunnan, China. From this data, we constructed habitat-occupancy relationship models for 35 bird species and documented tree-use patterns of 14 common arboreal foraging bird species. Our modeling results revealed that large diameter trees and heterogeneity in vertical vegetation structure were the most important habitat characteristics, and were positively associated with occupancy of 63 % of the study bird species. Furthermore, we found that occupancy of eight bird species of conservation concern was related to specific thresholds of forest integrity characteristics. For example, predicted occupancy of three of eight species was high in forested habitats with[15 % bamboo cover and was greatly reduced when bare ground cover exceeded 5 %. We found that bird species foraged on pine (Pinus densata, 58 % more than it was available) and poplar (Populus davidiana, 41 %) in higher proportion to their availability, but that foraging success was highest on fir (Abies spp.), oak (Quercus spp.), willow (Salix spp.) and Chinese Larch (Larix potaninii). Our findings suggest that, although conservation is not a primary management goal of Tibetan sacred forests, these lands harbor critical habitat features for forest breeding birds of the Chinese Himalaya.
File: Wood_etal_2015_Birds_TibetanSacredForests_0.pdf
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Conservation plans are commonly used tools for prioritizing areas for protection, but plan implementation is ofte limited and rarely formally evaluated. Without evaluations of planning outcomes, it is difficult to justify expendin resources to develop new plans and to adapt future plans so they are more likely to achieve desired conservatio outcomes. We evaluated implementation of four conservation plans in Wisconsin, USA, by quantifying land protectio within plan boundaries over time. We found that 44% of lands inside plans are currently protected, compared t 5% outside plans. We then asked which environmental, institutional, and socio-economic factors explained implementatio of the most recent (2008) plan by the state natural resources agency. Institutional and environmenta metrics related to agency policy and past actions explained 61% of implementation variability among individual priorit areas within the plan: the agency having secured acquisition authority (a policy requirement) and subsequentl successfully protected land in the priority area prior to the conservation plan being completed, and acquiring lan near open water (a policy priority). Our findings suggest that implementation is possible under a wide variety o socio-economic settings and indicate that development of new conservation plans may not necessarily lead to actio in new locations in the near term, but rather may facilitate action in locations where the institutional groundwor for action has already been laid. Considering institutional policies of active conservation partners in the developmen of future conservation plans can facilitate identification of priority areas that are more likely to correspond with onthe-groun implementation opportunities.
File: Carter_etal_2015_BiologicalConservation.pdf
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Identifying the pollinators of Rhododendron species is of great interest due to potential conservation threats in the native range of the genus, but the pollinators of species in Rhododendron subgenus Hymenanthes section Pontica subsection Neriiflora are unknown. Bees (Hymenoptera; family Apidae) are thought to be the pollinators of many Rhododendron species; however, species in subsection Neriiflora have ornithophilous floral morphology. We studied R. floccigerum (subsection Neriiflora) to determine the identities of visiting, potentially pollinating, and robbing species through in-person and time lapsed camera trap observations. We compared floral morphological characteristics of R. floccigerum with visitor morphological measurements to determine if visitors could fit inside the corolla. Thirteen species were observed visiting R. floccigerum (two insects, two mammals, and nine birds) and this study provides the first empirical evidence of both bird and mammal visitors to Rhododendron species. We determined that the following species are potential pollinators: Bombus sp. (an insect genus), Aethopyga gouldiae, Garrulax affinis, Heterophasia melanoleuca, and Yuhina diademata (all bird species), and we suspect that Apis sp. (an insect genus), Dremomys pernyi, Tamiops swinhoei (two mammal species), Minla ignotincta, M. strigula, Parus major, and Phylloscopus affinis (four bird species) likely rob R. floccigerum. All visitors were able to fit their heads/bodies into the corolla. We also found that though predation is frequent, the number of robbers and variety of robbing methods is unlikely to contribute to floral morphological evolution or speciation. Further understanding of the pollination biology of species in subgenus Hymenanthes will allow for effective conservation.
File: Georgian_etal_2015_PollinationEcology.pdf
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Land-use change is a major cause of wildlife habitat loss. Understanding how changes in land-use policies and economic factors can impact future trends in land use and wildlife habitat loss is therefore critical for conservation efforts. Our goal here was to evaluate the consequences of future land-use changes under different conservation policies and crop market conditions on habitat loss for wildlife species in the southeastern United States. We predicted the rates of habitat loss for 336 terrestrial vertebrate species by 2051. We focused on habitat loss due to the expansion of urban, crop, and pasture. Future land-use changes following business-as-usual conditions resulted in relatively low rates of wildlife habitat loss across the entire Southeast, but some ecoregions and species groups experienced much higher habitat loss than others. Increased crop commodity prices exacerbated wildlife habitat loss in most ecoregions, while the implementation of conservation policies (reduced urban sprawl, and payments for land conservation) reduced the projected habitat loss in some regions, to a certain degree. Overall, urban and crop expansion were the main drivers of habitat loss. Reptiles and wildlife species associated with open vegetation (grasslands, open woodlands) were the species groups most vulnerable to future land-use change. Effective conservation of wildlife habitat in the Southeast should give special consideration to future land-use changes, regional variations, and the forces that could shape land-use decisions.
File: Martinuzzi_etal_EcoApps_2015.pdf
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The onset of spring plant growth has shifted earlier in the year over the past several decades due t rising global temperatures. Earlier spring onset may cause phenological mismatches between th availability of plant resources and dependent animals, and potentially lead to more false springs, whe subsequent freezing temperatures damage new plant growth. We used the extended spring indices t project changes in spring onset, defined by leaf out and by first bloom, and predicted false springs unti 2100 in the conterminous United States(US) using statistically-downscaled climate projections fro the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 ensemble. Averaged over our study region, the media shift in spring onset was 23 days earlier in the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenario wit particularly large shifts in the Western US and the Great Plains. Spatial variation in phenology was du to the influence of short-term temperature changes around the time of spring onset versus seasonlon accumulation of warm temperatures. False spring risk increased in the Great Plains and portion of the Midwest, but remained constant or decreased elsewhere. We conclude that global climat change may have complex and spatially variable effects on spring onset and false springs, making loca predictions of change difficult.
File: Allstadt_etal_2015_EnvResLet.pdf
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In an increasingly human-dominated world, conservation requires the mitigation of conflicts between large mammals and people. Conflicts are particularly problematic when resources are limited, such as at wintering sites. Such conflicts have fragmented many large mammal populations, making reintroductions in suitable sites necessary. Broad-scale habitat suitability mapping can help to identify sites for species' reintroductions. The European bison is a good example of a large mammal that is restricted to only a fraction of its former range. The goal of our study was to identify and assess potential habitat for European bison in the Caucasus Mountains, which is a part of its former range and has the potential to harbor larger populations. Specifically, we used seasonal presence data from four reintroduced European bison populations and two sets of predictor variables to: (i) map habitat suitability for summer and winter, (ii) characterize habitat based on management-relevant categories that capture the potential for conflicts with people, and (iii) identify candidate sites for reintroductions. We found substantial areas of suitable habitat. However, areas of potential conflicts with people were widespread and often near highly suitable areas. We identified 69 potential reintroduction sites (10 230 km2 , 1.8% of the ecoregion) that have suitable summer and winter habitat with relatively low risk of human-wildlife conflict. These results can guide conservation efforts in establishing a viable European bison metapopulation in the Caucasus ecoregion. More broadly, our results highlight the need to map large mammal habitat suitability for different seasons in order to derive meaningful conservation recommendations.
File: Bleyhl_etal_2015_BioCons.pdf
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