The potential impact of climate change on Dracaena cinnabari, a spectacular relict of the Mio-Pliocene Laurasian subtropical forest in Socotra (Yemen), was analysed. Current distribution, abundance and vertical structure of D. cinnabari populations were assessed with 74 plots in nine remnant areas. A deterministic regression tree analysis model was...
Recent observations show that human-induced climate change (CC) and land transformation (LT) are threatening wildlife globally. Thus, there is a need to assess the sensitivity of wildlife on large spatial scales and evaluate whether national parks (NPs), a key conservation tools used to protect species, will meet their mandate under future CC and L...
Matsutake (Tricholoma spp.) are a group of commercially important mushrooms that are increasingly threatened by over-collection. Ecologically sustainable management of matsutake has been hindered by the lack of essential information such as reliable distribution maps. Although a variety of spatial distribution models have been applied to map many d...
Recent observations show that human-induced climate change (CC) and land transformation (LT) are threatening wildlife globally. Thus, there is a need to assess the sensitivity of wildlife on large spatial scales and evaluate whether national parks (NPs), a key conservation tools used to protect species, will meet their mandate under future CC and L...
We modelled the future distribution in 2050 of 975 endemic plant species in southern Africa distributed among seven life forms, including new methodological insights improving the accuracy and ecological realism of predictions of global changes studies by: (i) using only endemic species as a way to capture the full realized niche of species, (ii) c...
Published in Biology letters
Distribution and abundance patterns at the community and metacommunity scale can result from two distinct mechanisms. Random dispersal followed by non-random, site-specific mortality (species sorting) is the dominant paradigm in community ecology, while habitat selection provides an alternative, largely unexplored, mechanism with different demograp...
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
The human enterprise is flooding Earth's ecosystems with exotic species. Human population size is often correlated with species introductions, whereas more proximate mechanisms, such as economic activities, are frequently overlooked. Here we present a hypothesis that links ecology and economics to provide a causal framework for the distribution of ...
Published in Environmental Modeling & Assessment
Two approaches to formulating the reserve site selection problem when species occurrence data is probabilistic were solved for terrestrial vertebrates in a small set of potential reserve sites in Oregon. The expected coverage approach, which maximizes the sum of the occurrence probabilities, yielded solutions that covered more species on average in...
Published in Biodiversity & Conservation
Rivers in central Amazonia experience annual water-level fluctuations of up to 14 m, flooding vast areas of adjacent forest for periods ranging from a few to 270 days per year. At different sites, variation in the duration and type of flooding results in a mosaic of habitats that includes lakes, grasslands, forests, and streams. To study the effect...
