George L.W. Perry results 30
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Native‐Alien Dichotomy in Pathogen Genomics: Host Specialization Versus Environmental DecouplingNARA Subscribed
Genome size is a key genomic trait underpinning evolutionary potential and ecological adaptation in pathogens, yet its biogeographic patterns remain poorly understood. From New Zealand data, we quantify the influence of host traits versus environmental factors on biogeographic patterns of genome size in pathogenic fungi, and test whether these predictors differ between native and alien pathogens. Host plants were the strongest...
An Urban Taonga: The Distribution and Abundance of Tuna in Urban Streams Across Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa‐New ZealandNARA Subscribed
Freshwater eels of the Anguilla genus are experiencing global decline, largely driven by human activity. In Aotearoa‐New Zealand, tuna (both shortfin and longfin eels) are similarly affected, with habitat fragmentation and modification key drivers of their decline. We investigated the distribution and abundance of tuna across regional, catchment and reach‐level scales in an urban environment. We developed species distribution...
Leaf Dry Matter Content Is Phylogenetically Conserved and Related to Environmental Conditions, Especially Wildfire ActivityNARA Subscribed
Leaf dry matter content (LDMC) is an important determinant of plant flammability. Investigating global patterns of LDMC could provide insights into worldwide plant flammability patterns, informing wildfire management. We characterised global patterns of LDMC across 4074 species from 216 families, revealing that phylogenetic and environmental constraints influence LDMC. LDMC varied across growth forms and taxonomic groups, disp...
Revealing the palaeoecology of silent taxa: selecting proxy species from associations in modern vegetation dataNARA Subscribed
Aim Species severely under‐represented in fossil pollen records leave gaps in interpretations and reconstructions of past vegetation. These ‘silent taxa’ leave little or no trace due to low pollen production, dispersal, preservation and taxonomic resolution. An approach for including them is through associating them with other species with reliable pollen representation. Here, we demonstrate a method for selecting such a proxy...
Drivers of shoreline change on Pacific coral reef islands: linking island change to processesNARA Subscribed
Reef islands are considered highly vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. While existing studies provide evidence of high dynamism and predominant stability over recent periods of sea-level rise, efforts to statistically link recorded morphological changes to processes are limited. We analyse shoreline changes across an expansive region of diverse oceanographic and climatic conditions and assess those obser...
An Outlook for Deep Learning in Ecosystem ScienceNARA Subscribed
Rapid advances in hardware and software, accompanied by public- and private-sector investment, have led to a new generation of data-driven computational tools. Recently, there has been a particular focus on deep learning—a class of machine learning algorithms that uses deep neural networks to identify patterns in large and heterogeneous datasets. These developments have been accompanied by both hype and scepticism by ecologist...
Prolonging survival in good health is a fundamental societal goal. However, the leading determinants of disability-free survival in healthy older people have not been well established. Data from ASPREE, a bi-national placebo-controlled trial of aspirin with 4.7 years median follow-up, was analysed. At enrolment, participants were healthy and without prior cardiovascular events, dementia or persistent physical disability. Disab...
Trait matching and phenological overlap increase the spatio‐temporal stability and functionality of plant–pollinator interactionsNARA Subscribed
Morphology and phenology influence plant–pollinator network structure, but whether they generate more stable pairwise interactions with higher pollination success remains unknown. Here we evaluate the importance of morphological trait matching, phenological overlap and specialisation for the spatio‐temporal stability (measured as variability) of plant–pollinator interactions and for pollination success, while controlling for s...
Aim Island isolation is measured in many ways. We seek to determine what the underlying latent factors characterizing these measures are, in order to understand how they mechanistically drive island biogeographical patterns and in order to recommend the most parsimonious measures. We then test the discriminatory power of the identified components against hypotheses generated from the biogeographical patterns of invasive rats....
Front CoverNARA Subscribed
Global importance of large‐diameter treesNARA Subscribed
Aim To examine the contribution of large‐diameter trees to biomass, stand structure, and species richness across forest biomes. Location Global. Time period Early 21st century. Major taxa studied Woody plants. Methods We examined the contribution of large trees to forest density, richness and biomass using a global network of 48 large (from 2 to 60 ha) forest plots representing 5,601,473 stems across 9,298 species and 210 plan...
Fire regimes are powerful selective filters. In New Zealand, fire activity was rare before human settlement, and New Zealand’s indigenous woody flora shows little adaptation to frequent fire. One of the few woody indigenous species to show adaptation to frequent fire is Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae), a Plio‐Pleistocene immigrant from Australia. Leptospermum scoparium is a widespread early‐successional shrub to small tree...
Size‐based fruit selection by a keystone avian frugivore and effects on seed viabilityNARA Subscribed
The non‐random selection of fruits by frugivores can affect plant demography by changing the probability of seedling recruitment. We investigated whether the New Zealand pigeon ( Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae ) exhibits size‐based preference of fruit in two indigenous tree species, Vitex lucens and Prumnopitys ferruginea , that have large fleshy diaspores containing single seeds. We also assessed if there was an advantage for seed...
Exploring fire adaptation in a land with little fire: serotiny in Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae)NARA Subscribed
Aim Immigrant floras often have distinctive traits, well suited to the host region but absent from the autochthonous flora. An example is serotiny in the New Zealand ( NZ ) small tree, Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae) belonging to a strongly fire‐adapted Australian clade. Serotiny in L. scoparium has been attributed either to strong selection by fire since human settlement, or taken as evidence that pre‐human fire in NZ was...
Global change is impacting forests worldwide, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services including climate regulation. Understanding how forests respond is critical to forest conservation and climate protection. This review describes an international network of 59 long‐term forest dynamics research sites ( CTFS ‐Forest GEO ) useful for characterizing forest responses to global change. Within very large plots (median size...
In many ecosystems ungulates have coexisted with grasslands over long periods of time. However, high densities of grazing animals may change the floristic and structural characteristics of vegetation, reduce biodiversity, and increase soil erosion, potentially triggering abrupt and rapid changes in ecosystem condition. Alternate stable state theory provides a framework for understanding this type of dynamic. In the Sanjiangyua...
Reconstructing spatial vulnerability to forest loss by fire in pre‐historic New ZealandNARA Subscribed
Aim Despite small and transient populations, early Māori transformed large areas of New Zealand's forest landscapes. We sought to isolate the biophysical predictors that explain forest loss in the pre‐historic (i.e. pre‐European) period in New Zealand. Location New Zealand. Methods We used resampled boosted regression trees to isolate the key predictors of forest loss from a suite of 19 topographic, climatic, soil‐related and...
Explaining fire‐driven landscape transformation during the Initial Burning Period of N ew Z ealand's prehistoryNARA Subscribed
At the time of M āori settlement, ca. 750 years ago, N ew Z ealand's ecosystems experienced catastrophic change, including the introduction of fire to ignition‐limited ecosystems and the resulting widespread loss of forest. While high‐resolution sediment‐charcoal analyses suggest this forest loss was rapid, M āori populations were small and transient during the Initial Burning Period and there is evidence for widespread fire a...