Search results for "Species distributions"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Mammal assemblage composition predicts global patterns in emerging infectious disease risk
2021
Abstract As a source of emerging infectious diseases, wildlife assemblages (and related spatial patterns) must be quantitatively assessed to help identify high‐risk locations. Previous assessments have largely focussed on the distributions of individual species; however, transmission dynamics are expected to depend on assemblage composition. Moreover, disease–diversity relationships have mainly been studied in the context of species loss, but assemblage composition and disease risk (e.g. infection prevalence in wildlife assemblages) can change without extinction. Based on the predicted distributions and abundances of 4466 mammal species, we estimated global patterns of disease risk through …
Scientific Reports
2019
Anthropogenic climate change ranks among the major global-scale threats to modern biodiversity. Extinction risks are known to increase via the interactions between rapid climatic alterations and environmentally-sensitive species traits that fail to adapt to those changes. Accumulating evidence reveals the influence of ecophysiological, ecological and phenological factors as drivers underlying demographic collapses that lead to population extinctions. However, the extent to which life-history traits influence population responses to climate change remains largely unexplored. The emerging 'cul-de-sac hypothesis' predicts that reptilian viviparity ('live-bearing' reproduction), a 'key innovati…
Experimental approaches for testing if tolerance curves are useful for predicting fitness in fluctuating environments
2017
Most experimental studies on adaptation to stressful environments are performed under conditions that are rather constant and rarely ecologically relevant. Fluctuations in natural environmental conditions are ubiquitous and include for example variation in intensity and duration of temperature, droughts, parasite loads, and availability of nutrients, predators and competitors. The frequency and amplitude of many of these fluctuations are expected to increase with climate change. Tolerance curves are often used to describe fitness components across environmental gradients. Such curves can be obtained by assessing performance in a range of constant environmental conditions. In this perspectiv…