scholarly journals Statistical ecology comes of age

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 20140698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Gimenez ◽  
Stephen T. Buckland ◽  
Byron J. T. Morgan ◽  
Nicolas Bez ◽  
Sophie Bertrand ◽  
...  

The desire to predict the consequences of global environmental change has been the driver towards more realistic models embracing the variability and uncertainties inherent in ecology. Statistical ecology has gelled over the past decade as a discipline that moves away from describing patterns towards modelling the ecological processes that generate these patterns. Following the fourth International Statistical Ecology Conference (1–4 July 2014) in Montpellier, France, we analyse current trends in statistical ecology. Important advances in the analysis of individual movement, and in the modelling of population dynamics and species distributions, are made possible by the increasing use of hierarchical and hidden process models. Exciting research perspectives include the development of methods to interpret citizen science data and of efficient, flexible computational algorithms for model fitting. Statistical ecology has come of age: it now provides a general and mathematically rigorous framework linking ecological theory and empirical data.

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1787) ◽  
pp. 20140687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Poppy Lakeman-Fraser ◽  
Robert M. Ewers

Gaining insight into the impact of anthropogenic change on ecosystems requires investigation into interdependencies between multiple drivers of ecological change and multiple biotic responses. Global environmental change drivers can act simultaneously to impact the abundance and diversity of biota, but few studies have also measured the impact across trophic levels. We firstly investigated whether climate (using temperature differences across a latitudinal gradient as a surrogate) interacts with habitat fragmentation (measured according to fragment area and distance to habitat edges) to impact a New Zealand tri-trophic food chain (plant, herbivore and natural enemy). Secondly, we examined how these interactions might differentially impact both the density and biotic processes of species at each of the three trophic levels. We found evidence to suggest that these drivers act non-additively across trophic levels. The nature of these interactions however varied: location synergistically interacted with fragmentation measures to exacerbate the detrimental effects on consumer density; and antagonistically interacted to ameliorate the impact on plant density and on the interactions between trophic levels (herbivory and parasitoid attack rate). Our findings indicate that the ecological consequences of multiple global change drivers are strongly interactive and vary according to the trophic level studied and whether density or ecological processes are investigated.


jpa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Rawlins

Author(s):  
Machiel Lamers ◽  
Jeroen Nawijn ◽  
Eke Eijgelaar

Over the last decades a substantial and growing societal and academic interest has emerged for the development of sustainable tourism. Scholars have highlighted the contribution of tourism to global environmental change and to local, detrimental social and environmental effects as well as to ways in which tourism contributes to nature conservation. Nevertheless the role of tourist consumers in driving sustainable tourism has remained unconvincing and inconsistent. This chapter reviews the constraints and opportunities of political consumerism for sustainable tourism. The discussion covers stronger pockets and a key weak pocket of political consumerism for sustainable tourism and also highlights inconsistencies in sustainable tourism consumption by drawing on a range of social theory arguments and possible solutions. The chapter concludes with an agenda for future research on this topic.


Toxicon X ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 100069
Author(s):  
Gerardo Martín ◽  
Carlos Yáñez-Arenas ◽  
Rodrigo Rangel-Camacho ◽  
Kris A. Murray ◽  
Eyal Goldstein ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 3473
Author(s):  
Yong Lai ◽  
Guangqing Huang ◽  
Shengzhong Chen ◽  
Shaotao Lin ◽  
Wenjun Lin ◽  
...  

Anthropogenic land-use change is one of the main drivers of global environmental change. China has been on a fast track of land-use change since the Reform and Opening-up policy in 1978. In view of the situation, this study aims to optimize land use and provide a way to effectively coordinate the development and ecological protection in China. We took East Guangdong (EGD), an underdeveloped but populous region, as a case study. We used land-use changes indexes to demonstrate the land-use dynamics in EGD from 2000 to 2020, then identified the hot spots for fast-growing areas of built-up land and simulated land use in 2030 using the future land-use simulation (FLUS) model. The results indicated that the cropland and the built-up land changed in a large proportion during the study period. Then we established the ecological security pattern (ESP) according to the minimal cumulative resistance model (MCRM) based on the natural and socioeconomic factors. Corridors, buffer zones, and the key nodes were extracted by the MCRM to maintain landscape connectivity and key ecological processes of the study area. Moreover, the study showed the way to identify the conflict zones between future built-up land expansion with the corridors and buffer zones, which will be critical areas of consideration for future land-use management. Finally, some relevant policy recommendations are proposed based on the research result.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Carina Wyborn ◽  
Elena Louder ◽  
Mike Harfoot ◽  
Samantha Hill

Summary Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.


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