With the rise of new powerful statistical techniques and GIS tools, the development of predictive habitat distribution models has rapidly increased in ecology. Such models are static and probabilistic in nature, since they statistically relate the…
Environmental Sciences
Discipline summary
Sub-disciplines
Popular papers
-
-
Human alteration of the global environment has triggered the sixth major extinction event in the history of life and caused widespread changes in the global distribution of organisms. These changes in biodiversity alter ecosystem processes and…
-
In the last two decades, interest in species distribution models (SDMs) of plants and animals has grown dramatically. Recent advances in SDMs allow us to potentially forecast anthropogenic effects on patterns of biodiversity at different spatial…
-
Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning…
-
The literature on effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity is huge. It is also very diverse, with different authors measuring fragmentation in different ways and, as a consequence, drawing different conclusions regarding both the magnitude…
-
Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change, argue Johan Rockström and colleagues.
-
Causal attribution of recent biological trends to climate change is complicated because non-climatic influences dominate local, short-term biological changes. Any underlying signal from climate change is likely to be revealed by analyses that seek…
-
Prediction of species' distributions is central to diverse applications in ecology, evolution and conservation science. There is increasing electronic access to vast sets of occurrence records in museums and herbaria, yet little effective guidance…
-
The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth's life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of…
-
Modelling strategies for predicting the potential impacts of climate change on the natural distribution of species have often focused on the characterization of a species bioclimate envelope. A number of recent critiques have questioned the validity…
-
We developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution). The climate elements considered were monthly precipitation and mean, minimum,…
-
Choosing good problems is essential for being a good scientist. But what is a good problem, and how do you choose one? The subject is not usually discussed explicitly within our profession. Scientists are expected to be smart enough to figure it out…
-
Skeptics have questioned the empirical evidence that corridors provide landscape connectivity. Some also have suggested dangers of corridors. We reviewed published studies that empirically addressed whether corridors enhance or diminish the…
-
Conservationists are far from able to assist all species under threat, if only for lack of funding. This places a premium on priorities: how can we support the most species at the least cost? One way is to identify 'biodiversity hotspots' where…
-
Recently, researchers in several areas of ecology and evolution have begun to change the way in which they analyze data and make biological inferences. Rather than the traditional null hypothesis testing approach, they have adopted an approach…
-
Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter…
-
The articles in this special feature challenge the presumption that scholars can make simple, predictive models of social-ecological systems (SESs) and deduce universal solutions, panaceas, to problems of overuse or destruction of resources. Moving…
-
On the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it is timely to assess progress over the 10 years since its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro. Loss and degradation of remaining natural habitats has continued largely unabated. However,…
-
Species distribution modelling is central to both fundamental and applied research in biogeography. Despite widespread use of models, there are still important conceptual ambiguities as well as biotic and algorithmic uncertainties that need to be…
-
Error bars commonly appear in figures in publications, but experimental biologists are often unsure how they should be used and interpreted. In this article we illustrate some basic features of error bars and explain how they can help communicate…
Popular groups
-
Selected classic papers. Why were they so important? I will briefly comment, every week, the relevance of a selected paper from an historical… -
Advice and hints on paper writing. -
A meeting point for all sustainability practitioners -
Papers on ecosystem services, emphasizing work that looks at ecosystem services from a social-ecological perspective. -
Papers related to resilience thinking - focusing on resilience in social-ecological systems
Popular tags
Sign up today - FREE
Mendeley saves you time finding and organizing research. Learn more
- All your research in one place
- Add and import papers easily
- Access it anywhere, anytime
Start using Mendeley in seconds!
Active members
-
ProfessorFaculty of environmental and information studies, Keio university -
Associate ProfessorUniversity of British Columbia -
Ph.D. StudentInstituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia -
Ph.D. StudentRoyal Agricultural College -
Student (Master)University of Glasgow