Search results for "Unity"
showing 10 items of 3852 documents
Assessing the potential of marine Natura 2000 sites to produce ecosystem‐wide effects in rocky reefs: A case study from Sardinia Island (Italy)
2019
A number of policy measures have been adopted to cope with ongoing ocean degradation. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are among them. MPAs and their coverage have increased worldwide, including in EU waters. Natura 2000 (Nat2000) sites are at the core of the EU biodiversity conservation strategy and have been established to protect habitats and species included in two EU directives. Besides their specific objectives, their potential to contribute to an ecosystem-wide conservation and their complementarity with other national and supranational initiatives (e.g. nationally established MPA networks, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the Convention on Biological Diversity Ecosystem-Based A…
sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots
2021
Datos disponibles en https://github.com/fmsabatini/sPlotOpen_Code
Specialist butterflies benefit most from the ecological restoration of mires
2016
Abstract Anthropogenic disturbances cause biotic homogenization through the replacement of specialist species with generalists. Restoration has the potential to counteract these negative effects. Recently, restoration in the peatlands of Northern Europe has started to show positive effects on biodiversity. However, seldom have studies evaluated the response of insects to restoration by comparing populations prior to restoration to those thereafter with a Before-After Control-Impact (BACI) design. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the restoration actions taken were appropriate to facilitate the successful recolonization of mire butterflies and plants. We found that, generally, dr…
Effects of stand-level and landscape factors on understorey plant community traits in broad-leaved forest of the boreo-nemoral zone in Latvia
2019
Abstract Knowledge of the limiting processes shaping the composition of plant communities of woodland is important in conservation of biological diversity. The aim of our study was to examine the effect of stand-level factors (soil and canopy composition, age and area) and landscape factors (fragmentation of broad-leaved forest, distance to a historical manor house, and past history) on plant community trait composition in broad-leaved forest. We hypothesized that the plant functional community is shaped by both dispersal filtering due to landscape factors and by environmental characteristics. We recorded all vascular plants, described canopy composition and estimated soil characteristics i…
Evaluating structural and compositional canopy characteristics to predict the light-demand signature of the forest understorey in mixed, semi-natural…
2020
Questions: Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy-to-measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how well they can predict the light-demand signature of the forest understorey (estimated as the mean Ellenberg indicator value for light [“EIVLIGHT”] and the proportion of “forest specialists” [“%FS”] within the plots). Furthermore, we asked whether accounting for the shade-casting ability of individual canopy species could improve predictions of EIV…
The Impact of Variations in the Climate on Seasonal Dynamics of Phytoplankton
2009
Phytoplankton, an assemblage of suspended, primarily autotrophic single cells and colonies, forms part of the base of the pelagic food chain in lakes. The responses of phytoplankton to anthropogenic pressures frequently provide the most visible indication of a long-term change in water quality. Several attributes related to the growth and composition of phytoplankton, such as their community structure, abundance as well as the frequency and the intensity of blooms, are included as indicators of water quality in the Water Framework Directive. The growth and seasonal succession of phytoplankton is regulated by a variety of external as well as internal factors (Reynolds et al., 1993; Reynolds,…
Succession in ant communities (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in deciduous forest clear-cuts - an Eastern European case study
2017
Clear-cutting, the main method of harvesting in many forests in the world, causes a series of dramatic environmental changes to the forest habitat and removes habitat resources for arboreal and epigeal species. It results in considerable changes in the composition of both plant and animal communities. Ants have many critical roles in the maintenance and functioning of forest ecosystems. Therefore, the response of ants to clear-cutting and the time it takes for an ant community to recover after clear-cutting are important indicators of the effect of this harvesting technique on the forest ecosystem. We investigated ground-dwelling ant communities during secondary succession of deciduous fore…
Accounting for species interactions is necessary for predicting how arctic arthropod communities respond to climate change
2021
Species interactions are known to structure ecological communities. Still, the influence of climate change on biodiversity has primarily been evaluated by correlating individual species distributions with local climatic descriptors, then extrapolating into future climate scenarios. We ask whether predictions on arctic arthropod response to climate change can be improved by accounting for species interactions. For this, we use a 14-year-long, weekly time series from Greenland, resolved to the species level by mitogenome mapping. During the study period, temperature increased by 2 degrees C and arthropod species richness halved. We show that with abiotic variables alone, we are essentially un…
Conservation and people: Towards an ethical code of conduct for the use of camera traps in wildlife research
2020
International audience; Abstract 1. Camera trapping is a widely employed tool in wildlife research, used to estimate animal abundances, understand animal movement, assess species richness and understand animal behaviour. In addition to images of wild animals, research cameras often record human images, inadvertently capturing behaviours ranging from innocuous actions to potentially serious crimes. 2. With the increasing use of camera traps, there is an urgent need to reflect on how researchers should deal with human images caught on cameras. On the one hand, it is important to respect the privacy of individuals caught on cameras, while, on the other hand, there is a larger public duty to re…
Analysis of spatial patterns informs community assembly and sampling requirements for Collembola in forest soils
2018
Abstract The relative importance of niche separation, non-equilibrial and neutral models of community assembly has been a theme in community ecology for many decades with none appearing to be applicable under all circumstances. In this study, Collembola species abundances were recorded over eleven consecutive years in a spatially explicit grid and used to examine (i) whether observed beta diversity differed from that expected under conditions of neutrality, (ii) whether sampling points differed in their relative contributions to overall beta diversity, and (iii) the number of samples required to provide comparable estimates of species richness across three forest sites. Neutrality could not…