Host dispersal shapes the population structure of a tick-borne bacterial pathogen
Birds are hosts for several zoonotic pathogens. Because of their high mobility, especially of longdistance migrants, birds can disperse these pathogens, affecting their distribution and phylogeography. We focused on Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, which includes the causative agents of Lyme borreliosis, as an example for tick-borne pathogens, to address the role of birds as propagation hosts of zoonotic agents at a large geographical scale. We collected ticks from passerine birds in 11 European countries. B. burgdorferi s.l. prevalence in Ixodes spp. was 37% and increased with latitude. The fieldfare Turdus pilaris and the blackbird T. merula carried ticks with the highest Borrelia prevale…
Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences
Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates. Randomised designs and controlled observational designs with pre-intervention sampling were used by just 23% of intervention studies in biodiversity conservation, and 36% of intervention studies in social science. We demonstrate, through pairwise within-study comparisons across 49 environmental da…
Frontiers for conservation: targeting European borders as conservation areas
It has been long recognized that political borders should not hamper wildlife, and that conservation actions involving several countries are known to bring large scale benefits to nature while helping to resolve social and political conflicts. While many neighboring countries have lived a considerable long peace time, namely the European western countries, several eastern countries were isolated from the west regions due to the so called "iron curtain". More recently, in the former Yugoslavia and currently along the border of Ukraine-Russia, devastating conflicts are also isolating regions and countries. On the other hand, human development, and particularly transportation network…