🚨New paper🚨 For decades, it was widely assumed tropical species would be hit hardest by #ClimateChange. Turns out climate-related local #extinctions are already more frequent among temperate species. Read our new study 🧵 @natclimate.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... #BiodiversityLoss #SciSky

Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions - Nature Climate Change

The authors analyse global-scale resurvey data for 5,151 species to reveal the sensitivity of tropical versus temperate species to climate change. They show significantly higher frequencies of local e...

doi.org

Surprising result: Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions. Across 39,157 sites, climate-related local extinctions affected 49% of temperate species compared with 33% of tropical spp. Biodiversity loss is a global crisis. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions - Nature Climate Change

The authors analyse global-scale resurvey data for 5,151 species to reveal the sensitivity of tropical versus temperate species to climate change. They show significantly higher frequencies of local e...

nature.com

A global study of 5,151 species found climate-driven local extinctions are more common in temperate regions than in the tropics. The findings suggest biodiversity is already being reshaped by rising temperatures. DOI: doi.org/hb77dp #ClimateChange #Biodiversity #TemperateRegions

Temperate species found more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought • Muser Press

Local extinctions associated with climate change are occurring more frequently in temperate regions than in tropical ones, according to a global analysis

muser.press

@yaelbird.bsky.social and @gopalmurali.bsky.social developed a wildlife-oriented soundscape map for Israel, revealing that road noise negatively impacts 43% of non-urban lands and 23% of protected areas. Open access in @peopleandnature.bsky.social besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Effect distances of road traffic noise on wildlife behaviour: A soundscape mapping approach using bird habitat selection

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Effects of future climate extreme heat events and land use changes on land vertebrates "By [2100], ... 7895 species are expected to face extreme heat events and/or unsuitable land use changes across their entire range, & thus potentially go globally extinct" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Effects of Future Climate Extreme Heat Events and Land Use Changes on Land Vertebrates

Our study demonstrates how the combined effects of extreme heat events resulting from climate change and land-use change may impact land vertebrates worldwide by 2100. Using global projections across...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New publication: Rethinking desert definitions: Bridging the gap between science, policy, and conservation Open access link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Rethinking desert definitions: Bridging the gap between science, policy, and conservation - Ambio

Deserts are often misperceived as desolate, non-productive landscapes. This perception contributes to the misuse of terms like ‘semiarid’ and ‘desertification’, creating ambiguity in how deserts are d...

link.springer.com

Human-induced pressures are expected to intensify this century. @uriroll.bsky.social &co present #ProactiveConservationIndex, a new tool for #conservation prioritization regarding future threats for any group of species, & apply it to all terrestrial #vertebrates @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3WVRpRH

Extreme climate events can catalyze rapid evolutionary change! in our new Current Biology (@currentbiology.bsky.social) piece, Colin and I argue it’s time to study their evolutionary consequences systematically — beyond opportunistic observations. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Evolutionary consequences of extreme climate events

Simon Baeckens and Colin Donihue review case studies of rapid evolutionary change in response to extreme climate events and sketch a framework for future studies in the rapidly changing climate of the...

cell.com

Nature research paper: Stronger El Niños reduce tropical forest arthropod diversity and function go.nature.com/40WEeCG

Stronger El Niños reduce tropical forest arthropod diversity and function - Nature

Time-series data from tropical forests tracking weather and declines in arthropod diversity and function show that fluctuations in species were largely dependent on their El Niño sensitivity and ecological specialization.

go.nature.com

🫠. A tree came out today with 9,072 bird species, all placements based on actual DNA. It looks like they used eBird 2022 taxonomy; 10,096 were recognized back then. That means these folks just dropped (molecularly well informed) knowledge on 83% of the world's birds. www.cell.com/current-biol...

A new time tree of birds reveals the interplay between dispersal, geographic range size, and diversification

Flight may affect the dispersal and evolution of birds. Using a new evolutionary tree, Claramunt et al. find that efficient fliers have broader geographic ranges, and speciation reduces range size, bu...

cell.com

Why do treehoppers look so weird?! Our latest paper, out this week in @pnas.org, suggests a perhaps unexpected reason - static electricity ⚡ We show that treehoppers can detect the electrostatic cues of predators and that their crazy shapes may boost their electrosensitivity! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Electroreception in treehoppers: How extreme morphologies can increase electrical sensitivity | PNAS

The link between form and function of an organism’s morphology is usually apparent or intuitive. However, some clades of organisms show remarkable ...

doi.org

Ecology and Biogeography of Sexual Size Dimorphism in Squamates, Liang et al., GEB onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

maybe my favorite paper I've written, I have a synthesis out today early access in @asn-amnat.bsky.social today that attempts to answer a simple but slippery question: what is an elevational range? doi.org/10.1086/737130

NEW SCIENCE! 🚨🚨🚨🧪🪶🌐 Our paper is now online at @natecoevo.nature.com! “Geographic redistributions are insufficient to mitigate exposure to climate change in North American birds”. We know birds are moving north with climate change, but what are the consequences? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“observed patterns of island biodiversity … demonstrate that neutral models can make accurate predictions of higher-order diversity statistics. “ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 🧪🌐

Quantitatively Testing Predictions From Mechanistic Models: A Case Study for Island Biodiversity

A key test of an ecological model is whether it can quantitatively predict unseen aspects of the data not used in model fitting. Here, we test whether a model fitted only to island alpha diversity ca....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

“There’s just no moths on that sheet.” @tessairini.bsky.social writes in the @theguardian.com about #InsectDecline with #DanJanzen, #WinnieHallwachs and the caterpillars of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste #ACG in #CostaRica @gdfcf.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Amazon rainforest adjusts to long-term experimental drought ..."After elevated tree mortality during the first 15 years, ecosystem-level structural changes resulted in the remaining trees no longer experiencing drought stress." 🧪🌐🌾 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amazon rainforest adjusts to long-term experimental drought - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Drought is a growing issue in tropical rainforests. Here, the authors revisit a long-term rainfall manipulation experiment in the Amazon to show that tree mortality was followed by community-level adj...

nature.com

Happy to share my new article on how morphological diversification proceeds during evolutionary radiations: "The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵 1/12

The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty | PNAS

Rates of evolution are fundamental to understand the processes that shaped the history of life. The predominant view holds that high rates of pheno...

pnas.org

Human pressures reshape biodiversity, but not always in expected ways. No global biotic homogenization found. Impacts vary by threat, taxa, and scale. #LandUse #Overexploitation #Pollution #ClimateChange #Invasives 👉Conservation must get specific #KnowYourPressure #TailorYourStrategy #BendTheCurve

The global human impact on biodiversity - Nature

Key measures of biodiversity were quantified and found to be affected by human pressures that shifted community composition and decreased local diversity across terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecos...

nature.com

Exciting news! @wcratcliff.bsky.social and I published an essay last week in @nature.com reviewing the substantial contributions of 'long-term' studies to evolutionary biology www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

Welp this is horrifying. These researchers quantified the "stratigraphy" of plastic waste used in Common Coot nests. Using expiration dates, they found one nest that contained 635 (!!!) pieces of trash, including plastic dating back to 1991. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

New paper in @nature.com led by @patricepottier.bsky.social! We demonstrated global vulnerability of amphibians to warming, threatening 10% of >5,000 species examined. How did we do it? See thread🧵 Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢Our new paper on alien vertebrates in the world's mountains is now out @naturecomms.bsky.social. Using data on 700+ spp across ~3,000 mountains we explore their distribution patterns,flows across realms, presence in protected areas, and the factors driving these trends. 🐟🐸🦎🦜🦝⛰️ 👉 rdcu.be/ebidu

The global distribution patterns of alien vertebrate richness in mountains

Nature Communications - Among contemporary threats to mountain biodiversity, biological invasions have been understudied. This large-scale synthesis on alien vertebrates in global mountains delves...

rdcu.be

Our study on Duttaphrynus melanostictus evolution published in Nature Communication. We showed how these toads likely spread across the Indian Ocean via human transport, from ancient trade routes to modern shipping. 🌍🐸 @chrisdufresnes.bsky.social @naturecomms.bsky.social @comeniusuni.bsky.social

The late Eric Pianka made thousands of observations of desert lizard body temperature and activity. We used them to test biophysical models of their cost of living and projected the models to past and future climates in Africa and Australia #unimelb #ARC @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Climate change and the cost-of-living squeeze in desert lizards

Climate warming can induce a cost-of-living “squeeze” in ectotherms by increasing energetic expenditures while reducing foraging gains. We used biophysical models (validated by 2685 field observations...

science.org

I'm very happy to announce I just published a paper from my post doc with Gavin Thomas in @natureecoevo.bsky.social! So if you're interested in #macroevolution, #phylogenetics and sexual size dimorphism (SSD), strap in doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Evolution of sexual size dimorphism in tetrapods is driven by varying patterns of sex-specific selection on size - Nature Ecology & Evolution

A phylogenetic comparative analysis of male and female body size across tetrapods globally shows that directional change in size is usually greater in males but reveals different underlying mechanisms...

doi.org

New work from the lab! Annelise Blanchette found that brown anole lizards may be the most lead (pb) tolerant vertebrate known to date by integrating physiological studies of field and lab exposed animals and transcriptomics #urbanecology #ecotox #anolis 🦎 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extreme lead tolerance in an urban lizard

Lead (Pb) is an extremely toxic heavy metal pollutant pervasive in many environments with serious health consequences for humans and wildlife. Identifying organisms that can serve as biomonitors of le...

biorxiv.org

🌍🌱 It’s often believed that plant communities with greater phylogenetic diversity also have higher functional diversity. In other words, the more evolutionary lineages present, the greater the range of traits. But is this always true?

🚨Paper out! I am very proud to announce the publication of my very last #PhD article, exploring the vulnerability of terrestrial #vertebrates to #invasivespecies. Check the paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... With C. Bellard @celinebellard.bsky.social, B. Leroy, and G. Latombe

Exposure and Sensitivity of Terrestrial Vertebrates to Biological Invasions Worldwide

To reach the COP 15 objective of diminishing the impacts of biological invasions on native biota, one needs to identify the most vulnerable areas to this threat for prioritizing conservation actions.....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Come join us in Tucson!! I am excited to announce a tenure track faculty position on the genomics of resilience @uofa-eeb.bsky.social! Read more about the position in the updated link below! We will begin reviewing applications on December 9! arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...