What the Past Can Tell Us About the Future: Notes from Crossing the Palaeontological – Ecological Gap

Posted on September 18, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Karen Bacon

I had the pleasure of delivering one of the plenary talks at the first (hopefully of many) Crossing the Palaeontological – Ecological Gap meeting held in the University of Leeds on August 30^th and 31^st. I’m a geologist and a botanist, so this is a topic that’s close to my heart and my professional interests.

How Palaeoecology Can Help Us Today

©Gail Hampshire

As we move into an ecologically uncertain future with pressures of climate change, land-use change and resource limitations, the fossil record offers the only truly long-term record of how Earth’s ecosystems respond to major environmental upheaval driven by climate change events. The fossil record is, of course, not without its problems – there are gaps, not everything fossilises in the same way or numbers, and comparisons to today’s ecology are extremely difficult. It’s these difficulties (and other challenges) that make the uniting of palaeontology and ecology essential to fully address how plants, animals and other organisms have responded to major changes in the past. Perhaps uniting them could give us an idea of what to expect in our near-term future, as carbon dioxide levels return to those not previously experienced on Earth since the Pliocene, over 2 million years ago. Continue reading →

The Manager’s Dilemma: Which Species to Monitor?

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Payal Bal and Jonathan Rhodes

The greater bilby (M.Lagotis). ©Save the Bilby Fund

Imagine you’re the manager of a national park. One that’s rich in endemic biodiversity found nowhere else on the planet. It’s under the influence of multiple human pressures causing irreversible declines in the biodiversity, possibly even leading to the extinction of some of the species. You’re working with a complex system of multiple species and threats, limited knowledge of which threats are causing the biggest declines and limited resources. How do you decide what course of action to take to conserve the biodiversity of the park? This is the dilemma faced by biodiversity managers across the globe.

In our recent paper, ‘Quantifying the value of monitoring species in multi‐species, multi‐threat systems’, we address this problem and propose a method using value of information (VOI) analysis. VOI estimates the benefit of monitoring for management decision-making. Specifically, it’s a valuation tool that can be used to disentangle the trade-offs in competing monitoring actions. It helps managers decide how to invest (or whether to invest) their money in monitoring actions when faced with imminent biodiversity declines and the urgency of efficient conservation action. Continue reading →

Improving Biodiversity Monitoring using Satellite Remote Sensing

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Increased access to satellite imagery and new developments in remote sensing data analyses can support biodiversity conservation targets by stepping up monitoring processes at various spatial and temporal scales. More satellite imagery is becoming available as open data. Remote sensing based techniques to capitalise on the information contained in spatially-explicit species data, such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), are developing constantly. Current free and open data policy will have a dramatic impact on our ability to understand how biodiversity is being affected by anthropogenic pressures, while improving our ability to predict the consequences of changes at different scales.

In our latest Special Feature, ‘Improving Biodiversity Monitoring using Satellite Remote Sensing‘, Sandra Luque, Nathalie Pettorelli, Petteri Vihervaara and Martin Wegmann explain why tackling this challenge is worth doing. The articles demonstrate how combining satellite remote sensing data with ground observations and adequate modelling can help to give us a better understanding of natural systems, leading to improved management practices. They focus on three key conservation challenges:

Monitoring of biodiversity
Developing an improved understanding of biodiversity patterns
Assessing biodiversity’s vulnerability to climate change

Continue reading →

Also of Interest… Journal of Applied Ecology

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Aaron M. Ellison

The Struggle is Real: Finding Interesting and Relevant Articles

Where to start? We are awash in data, information, papers, and books. There are hundreds of ecological and environmental journals published regularly around the world; the British Ecological Society alone publishes five journals and is now accepting submissions for a sixth (more information on People and Nature here).

None of us has time even to click on the various articles flagged by alerts, feeds, or keywords, and few even browse tables of contents (which are becoming irrelevant as we move to DOIs and immediate-online publication). Increasingly, we rely on our friends, colleagues, students, and mentors to point us towards papers we might find interesting – further evidence, I suppose, of the importance of good networks for knowledge creation and scientific understanding.

Regular readers of Methods in Ecology and Evolution or this Methods blog may not realise how many methodological papers are published routinely in our BES sister journals. In this inaugural posting of Also of interest…, I highlight three papers recently published in Journal of Applied Ecology that introduce and apply new, model-based methodology to interesting ecological questions. The specific methods are like many seen in the pages of Methods in Ecology and Evolution and suggest general approaches for modelling and studying complex ecological and environmental phenomena. Continue reading →

TV Coverage of Cycling Races Can Help Document the Effects of Climate Change

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Archive footage of the Tour of Flanders obtained by Flemish broadcaster VRT – Flanders Classics

Analysing nearly four decades of archive footage from the Tour of Flanders, researchers from Ghent University have been able to detect climate change impacts on trees. Their findings were published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Focusing on trees and shrubs growing around recognisable climbs and other ‘landmarks’ along the route of this major annual road cycling race in Belgium, the team looked at video footage from 1981 to 2016 obtained by Flemish broadcaster VRT. They visually estimated how many leaves and flowers were present on the day of the course (usually in early April) and linked their scores to climate data. Continue reading →

The Future of Solar Geolocation Tracking is NOW

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Julia Karagicheva, Theunis Piersma and Eldar Rakhimberdiev

Black-tailed godwit with leg-mounted solar geolocator. ©Jan van de Kam

Working on FLightR, the package for analysis of data obtained from solar geolocation tracking devices, we were haunted by the unpleasant feeling of investing in technology which will soon be out of date. Until now solar geolocators have been popular in ornithological studies. This is because they’re small, light-weight (< 1/3 g) tracking devices that can be deployed even on miniature birds, such as swallows and warblers. They’ve also been the longest-lasting data loggers, with the most storage space and, of course, the most affordable ones.

Are Solar Geolocators Finished?

There are apparent drawbacks of using this technique though. To begin with, solar geolocation simply does not work for some species. You can’t use it to study birds living in dense tropical forests or in cavities, because of the light-pattern bias. For the same reason, it doesn’t provide fantastic results in light-polluted areas. Data from geolocators cannot be retrieved remotely, and this is why you need to have high recapture rates for the species you’re studying. Continue reading →

Remote Camera Network Tracks Antarctic Species at Low Cost

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Estimating nest‐level phenology and reproductive success of colonial seabirds using time‐lapse cameras‘ taken from NOAA Fisheries.

Camera system in place in an Adélie and gentoo penguin colony ©Jefferson Hinke, NOAA Fisheries

An international research team has developed a simple method for using a network of autonomous time-lapse cameras to track the breeding and population dynamics of Antarctic penguins, providing a new, low-cost window into the health and productivity of the Antarctic ecosystem.

The team of scientists from NOAA Fisheries and several other nations published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, descriptions of the camera system and a new method for turning static images into useful data on the timing and success of penguin reproduction. They say that the system monitors penguins as effectively as scientists could in person, for a fraction of the cost. Continue reading →

Can Opportunistically Collected Citizen Science Data Create Reliable Habitat Suitability Models for Less Common Species?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Ute Bradter, Mari Jönsson and Tord Snäll

Detta blogginlägget är tillgängligt på svenska

Opportunistically collected species observation data, or citizen science data, are increasingly available. Importantly, they’re also becoming available for regions of the world and species for which few other data are available, and they may be able to fill a data gap.

In Sweden, over 60 million citizen science observations have been collected – an impressive number given that Sweden has a population of about 10 million people and that the Swedish Species Observation System, Artportalen, was created in 2000. For bird-watchers (or plant, fungi, or other animal enthusiasts), this is a good website to bookmark. It will give you a bit of help in finding species and as a bonus, has a lot of pretty pictures of interesting species. Given the amount of data citizen science can provide in areas with few other data, it’s important to evaluate whether they can be used reliably to answer questions in applied ecology or conservation. Continue reading →

Kan medborgarnas opportunistiskt insamlade data användas för artutbredningsmodeller av mindre vanliga arter?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Bloginlägg av Ute Bradter, Mari Jönsson och Tord Snäll

This blog post is available in English

Opportunistiskt insamlade artobservationer av frivilliga, så kallade medborgarforskningsdata, blir alltmer tillgängliga. Dessa data har potentialen att fylla ett databehov för olika regioner i världen och arter för vilka få andra data är tillgängliga.

I Sverige har över 60 miljoner artobservationer samlats in av frivilliga i Artportalen – ett imponerande antal med tanke på att Sverige har en befolkning på cirka 10 miljoner människor och att webbplatsen endast har funnits sedan år 2000. För fågelskådare (eller växt-, svamp-, andra djurentusiaster), är Artportalen en bra hemsida att bokmärka om man vill ha lite hjälp med att hitta arter eller tycker om att titta på vackra bilder på arter. Globalt samlas ett stort antal sådana uppgifter för artförekomst i Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Med tanke på den mängd data som medborgarforskare kan tillhandahålla för områden med få andra data är det viktigt att utvärdera om de kan användas för att tillförlitligt besvara frågor inom grundläggande ekologi eller naturvård. Continue reading →

Solo: Developing a Cheap and Flexible Bioacoustic Tool for Ecology and Conservation

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Chris Grieves

Post provided by Robin Whytock

A Solo recorder in the field. ©Tom Bradfer-Lawrence

Ecologists have long been fascinated by animal sounds and in recent decades there’s been growing interest in the field of ‘bioacoustics’. This has partially been driven by the availability of high-definition digital audio recorders that can withstand harsh field conditions, as well as improvements in software technology that can automate sound analysis.

Sound recordings can be used to study many aspects of animal behaviour in a non-intrusive way, from studying the social dynamics of monkeys or even clownfish to detecting echolocating bats or singing birds. Some species can only reliably be separated in the field by the sounds that they make, such as common and soprano pipistrelle bats. Bat research in general has been revolutionised by commercially available acoustic loggers, with some amazing advances using artificial intelligence to automatically detect bat calls. Continue reading →

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