E. E. Atkinson results 94
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Genomic Architecture of Inbreeding Depression Associated With Hatching Failure in an Endangered ParrotNARA Subscribed
Conservation management of endangered species increasingly relies on genomic approaches to understand how long‐term small population sizes affect the fitness of extant individuals. However, despite the growing investment in genomic resources by conservation programmes, the impact that sequencing methods have on the ability to detect inbreeding‐related phenomena has been largely overlooked. Here, we compare the use of whole‐gen...
Acoustic Monitoring Enables Multi‐Taxa Conservation Assessment and Prioritisation Over Large Scales and for Rare and Cryptic SpeciesNARA Subscribed
Aim To combat the global biodiversity crisis, robust and scalable data are needed to target, monitor and evaluate conservation efforts, particularly in data‐poor regions and for cryptic taxa. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has the potential to provide solutions, but real‐world examples are still rare. We demonstrate how PAM data can be used to rapidly and effectively map distributions of multiple taxa over large scales, in...
Shorebirds Are Shrinking and Shape‐Shifting: Declining Body Size and Lengthening Bills in the Past Half‐CenturyNARA Subscribed
Animals are predicted to shrink and shape‐shift as the climate warms, declining in size, while their appendages lengthen. Determining which types of species are undergoing these morphological changes, and why, is critical to understanding species responses to global change, including potential adaptation to climate warming. We examine body size and bill length changes in 25 shorebird species using extensive field data (> 200,0...
Community‐wide correlations between species richness, abundance and population genomic diversity in a freshwater biodiversity hotspotNARA Subscribed
Understanding patterns of diversity across macro (e.g. species‐level) and micro (e.g. molecular‐level) scales can shed light on community function and stability by elucidating the abiotic and biotic drivers of diversity within ecological communities. We examined the relationships among taxonomic and genetic metrics of diversity in freshwater mussels (Bivalvia: Unionidae), an ecologically important and species‐rich group in the...
Relative sea‐level changes in southeastern Australia during the 19 th and 20 th centuriesNARA Subscribed
Rates of global and regional sea‐level rise between ~1850 and 1950 were high compared to those in preceding centuries. The cause of this sea‐level acceleration remains uncertain, but it appears to be pronounced in a small set of relative sea‐level proxy records from the Southern Hemisphere. Here we generate three new proxy‐based relative sea‐level reconstructions for southeastern Australia to investigate spatial patterns and c...
Global efforts to deliver internationally agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services have been poorly integrated. These goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g., native, largely unmodified) and seminatural (e.g., low intensity or sustainable human use) forests, woodlands, and grasslands. To show how to unify these goals, we empirically derived spatially explic...
Marine protected areas (MPAs), particularly large MPAs, are increasing in number and size around the globe in part to facilitate the conservation of marine megafauna under the assumption that large-scale MPAs better align with vagile life histories; however, this alignment is not well established. Using a global tracking dataset from 36 species across five taxa, chosen to reflect the span of home range size in highly mobile ma...
Distinct type II opsins in the eye decode light properties for background adaptation and behavioural background preferenceNARA Subscribed
Crypsis increases survival by reducing predator detection. Xenopus laevis tadpoles decode light properties from the substrate to induce two responses: a cryptic coloration response where dorsal skin pigmentation is adjusted to the colour of the substrate (background adaptation) and a behavioural crypsis where organisms move to align with a specific colour surface (background preference). Both processes require organisms to det...
Increasing nutrient stress reduces the efficiency of energy transfer through planktonic size spectraNARA Subscribed
Size‐spectral approaches quantify the efficiency of energy transfer through food webs, but theory and field studies disagree over how changes in temperature, nutrients, and extreme weather impact on this efficiency. We address this at two scales: via 6 years of weekly sampling of the plankton size spectrum at the Plymouth L4 shelf sea site, and via a new, global‐scale, meta‐analysis of aquatic size spectra. The time series sho...
Increasing picocyanobacteria success in shelf waters contributes to long‐term food web degradationNARA Subscribed
Continental margins are disproportionally important for global primary production, fisheries and CO 2 uptake. However, across the Northeast Atlantic shelves, there has been an ongoing summertime decline of key biota—large diatoms, dinoflagellates and copepods—that traditionally fuel higher tropic levels such as fish, sea birds and marine mammals. Here, we combine multiple time series with in situ process studies to link these...
Mapping tree species vulnerability to multiple threats as a guide to restoration and conservation of tropical dry forestsNARA Subscribed
Understanding the vulnerability of tree species to anthropogenic threats is important for the efficient planning of restoration and conservation efforts. We quantified and compared the effects of future climate change and four current threats (fire, habitat conversion, overgrazing and overexploitation) on the 50 most common tree species of the tropical dry forests of northwestern Peru and southern Ecuador. We used an ensemble...
Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy is fundamental for halting anthropogenic climate change. However, renewable energy facilities can be land‐use intensive and impact conservation areas, and little attention has been given to whether the aggregated effect of energy transitions poses a substantial threat to global biodiversity. Here, we assess the extent of current and likely future renewable energy infrastructu...
Pregnancy rate and biomarker validations from the blubber of eastern North Pacific blue whalesNARA Subscribed
Hormonal biomarkers are useful indicators of mammalian reproductive and metabolic states. The present study validated and applied the use of progesterone and cortisol blubber assays for studies of blue whales from the Gulf of California, Mexico. In a validation study for pregnancy detection, blubber progesterone concentrations were correlated with pregnancy status for four female blue whales: three resighted with a calf the ye...
Phylogeny of Mesoamerican freshwater mussels and a revised tribe‐level classification of the AmbleminaeNARA Subscribed
Evolutionary and ecological hypotheses of the freshwater mussel subfamily Ambleminae are intensely geographically biased—a consequence of the complete exclusion of Mesoamerican taxa in phylogenetic reconstructions of the clade. We set out to integrate a portion of the Mesoamerican freshwater mussel assemblage into existing hypotheses of amblemine classification and evolution by generating a molecular phylogeny that includes fo...
Comment. What drives plankton seasonality in a stratifying shelf sea? Some competing and complementary theoriesNARA Subscribed
The Plymouth L4 time plankton series in the Western English Channel is a textbook example of a shallow, stratifying shelf sea system. Over its 30 yr of weekly sampling, this site has provided a diverse and contrasting suite of numerical and conceptual models of plankton bloom formation, phenology, and seasonal succession. The most recent of these papers, Kenitz et al. (2017) has initiated this comment, partly because we feel t...