Ben Phillips results 103
· Newest (Page 1/5, per page 25)
Author: Ben Phillips ×Clear All Filters
Search Results
Aim We investigate the distribution of dispersal modes — endozoochory (via animal ingestion), synzoochory (via animal seed accumulation) and anemochory (via wind)—and seed mass of woody plants across Brazilian ecosystems, testing whether their relative abundance in local plant communities could be predicted by climate, edaphic factors and dispersal agents (e.g., the main vectors moving seeds). We expected climate to be the mai...
A primary care pharmacogenetic precision medicine pilot based on specific Māori tribal ethical frameworks and principlesNARA Subscribed
Indigenous tribal communities are frequently underserved by genomic medicine because they are under-represented in research, often live in remote locations and have ethical and cultural perspectives that vary from westernised standpoints. The Rakeiora platform, a permissioning and analytical environment that incorporates Māori perspectives and ethical frameworks on how precision medicine research is best conducted was used to...
Crop wild relatives (CWR) contain an important reservoir of genetic material for use in plant breeding and can provide increased resistance to biotic and abiotic stress, contributing to improved food security. Systematic in situ conservation of CWR is limited by the lack of population-level genetic diversity studies and the development of management and monitoring strategies from their results. We present the first systematic...
The Cerrado biome, spanning ~2 million km 2 , is one of the most extensive and biodiverse tropical savannas, yet it is paradoxically dominated by only 30 hyperdominant tree species (~2% of all species, > 50% of all stems). However, their vulnerability to climate change and the effectiveness of current conservation efforts remain uncertain. By combining (i) species distribution models calibrated with edaphic‐climatic predictors...
The Toxicology Investigators Consortium 2024 Annual ReportNARA Subscribed
Genetic Allee Effects for Controlling Invasive PopulationsNARA Subscribed
Invasive pests threaten food security and devastate ecosystems. A universal problem in their management is that small populations can easily evade detection. This makes identifying new incursions challenging and complicates efforts to eradicate or contain established populations. If newly founded populations exhibited a strong Allee effect, small populations would tend towards extinction and most new incursions would go extinc...
Aim Predicting the potential distribution of an invasive species is critical for informing decisions around surveillance, containment and eradication. Mechanistic species distribution models directly describe how aspects of the environment affect organismal fitness through space and time. These models also provide insight into population dynamics, such as rates of population growth and spread. Here, we develop a temperature‐de...
Historically low microplastic loads within white bream ( Blicca bjoerkna ) in the Marmara basin, TürkiyeNARA Subscribed
Assessment of 154 white bream Blicca bjoerkna specimens collected between 1963 and 2004 from Manyas and Uluabat lake, northwest Türkiye, revealed that only 3.2% of fish were contaminated with microplastics, with a mean incidence and standard error of 0.04 ± 0.02 particles. Black fibres and white fragments were spectroscopically confirmed as polyamide and polyethylene terephthalate. Contamination status (contaminated/uncontamin...
Aim Competition is often proposed to drive niche segregation along multiple axes in speciose communities. Understanding spatial partitioning of foraging areas is particularly important in species that are constrained to a central place. We present a natural experiment examining variation in habitat preferences of congeneric Southern Ocean predators in sympatry and allopatry. Our aim was to ascertain consistency of habitat pref...
Dominance and rarity in tree communities across the globe: Patterns, predictors and threatsNARA Subscribed
Aim Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the following research questions: (1) What are the patterns of dominance and rarity in tree...
Influence of Local Aperture Heterogeneity on Invading Fluid Connectivity During Rough Fracture DrainageNARA Subscribed
Determining the (in)efficiency of wetting phase displacement by an invading non-wetting phase (drainage) in a single fracture is key to modelling upscaled properties such as relative permeability and capillary pressure. These constitutive relationships are fundamental to quantifying the contribution, or lack thereof, of conductive fracture systems to long-term leakage rates. Single-fracture-scale modelling and experimental stu...
Does the development environment cause the pace of life to change in a rainforest lizard?NARA Subscribed
Life history theory emphasizes that finite resources result in allocation trade-offs among the competing interests of self-maintenance, growth, reproduction, and survival. Environmental conditions, particularly during development, can influence these life history trade-offs, leading to the coupling of physiological and behavioural traits with life history strategies. Thus, populations may vary in the pattern of trait covariati...
Geography and ecology shape the phylogenetic composition of Amazonian tree communitiesNARA Subscribed
Aim Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated with either geographic regions or edaphic forest types. Location Amazonia. Taxon A...
Biological invasions pose a rapidly expanding threat to the persistence, functioning and service provisioning of ecosystems globally, and to socio‐economic interests. The stages of successful invasions are driven by the same mechanism that underlies adaptive changes across species in general—via natural selection on intraspecific variation in traits that influence survival and reproductive performance (i.e., fitness). Surprisi...