Globe-LFMC 2.0, an enhanced and updated dataset for live fuel moisture content research.

Globe-LFMC 2.0, an updated version of Globe-LFMC, is a comprehensive dataset of over 280,000 Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) measurements. These measurements were gathered through field campaigns conducted in 15 countries spanning 47 years.

Mammal responses to global changes in human activity vary by trophic group and landscape.

Wildlife must adapt to human presence to survive in the Anthropocene, so it is critical to understand species responses to humans in different contexts. We used camera trapping as a lens to view mammal responses to changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 163 species sampled in 102 projects around the world, changes in the amount and timing of animal activity varied widely.

A European-scale analysis reveals the complex roles of anthropogenic and climatic factors in driving the initiation of large wildfires.

Analysing wildfire initiation patterns and identifying their primary drivers is essential for the development of more efficient fire prevention strategies. However, such analyses have traditionally been conducted at local or national scales, hindering cross-border comparisons and the formulation of broad-scale policy initiatives. In this study, we present an analysis of the spatial variability of wildfire initiations across Europe, focusing specifically on moderate to large fires (> 100 ha), and examining the influence of both human and climatic factors on initiation areas.

Wildlife mortality risk posed by high and low traffic roads.

Wildlife mortality due to collisions with vehicles (roadkill) is one of the predominant negative effects exerted by roads on many wildlife species. Reducing roadkill is therefore a major component of wildlife conservation. Roadkill is affected by various factors, including road attributes and traffic volume.

Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment.

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence.

Species with moderate intraspecific trait variability are locally abundant within an environmentally heterogeneous subtropical forest.

Species with large intraspecific trait variability (ITV) have larger niche breadth than species with low ITV and thus are expected to be more abundant at the local scale. However, whether the positive ITV-abundance relationship holds in heterogeneous local environments remains uncertain. Using an individual-based trait dataset encompassing three leaf traits (leaf area, specific leaf area, and leaf dry mass content) of 20,248 individuals across 80 species in an environmentally heterogeneous subtropical forest in eastern China, ITV for each trait of each species was estimated by rarefaction.

Rapid growth of the US wildland-urban interface raises wildfire risk.

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses and wildland vegetation meet or intermingle, and where wildfire problems are most pronounced. Here we report that the WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.

Factors related to building loss due to wildfires in the conterminous United States.

Wildfire is globally an important ecological disturbance affecting biochemical cycles and vegetation composition, but also puts people and their homes at risk. Suppressing wildfires has detrimental ecological effects and can promote larger and more intense wildfires when fuels accumulate, which increases the threat to buildings in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Yet, when wildfires occur, typically only a small proportion of the buildings within the fire perimeter are lost, and the question is what determines which buildings burn.

Multidimensional differentiation in foraging resource use during breeding of two sympatric top predators.

Ecologically-similar species were found to develop specific strategies to partition their resources, leading to niche differentiation and divergence, in order to avoid interspecific competition. Our study determines multi-dimensional differentiation of two sympatric top-predators, long-legged buzzards (LLB) and short-toed eagles (STE), which recently became sympatric during their breeding season in the Judean Foothills, Israel. By combining information from comprehensive diet and movement analyses we found four dimensions of differentiation: (1) Geographic foraging area: LLB tended to forage relatively close to their nests (2.

Complex relationships between species niches and environmental heterogeneity affect species co-occurrence patterns in modelled and real communities.

Species co-occurrence analysis is commonly used to assess how interspecific interactions dictate community assembly. Non-random co-occurrences, however, may also emerge from niche differences as well as environmental heterogeneity. The relationships between species co-occurrence patterns, environmental heterogeneity and species niches are not fully understood, due to complex interactions among them.

Immigration rates and species niche characteristics affect the relationship between species richness and habitat heterogeneity in modeled meta-communities.

The positive relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species richness is a cornerstone of ecology. Recently, it was suggested that this relationship should be unimodal rather than linear due to a tradeoff between environmental heterogeneity and population sizes. Increased environmental heterogeneity will decrease effective habitat sizes, which in turn will increase the rate of local species extinctions.

Bird and mammal species composition in distinct geographic regions and their relationships with environmental factors across multiple spatial scales.

Global patters of species distributions and their underlying mechanisms are a major question in ecology, and the need for multi-scale analyses has been recognized. Previous studies recognized climate, topography, habitat heterogeneity and disturbance as important variables affecting such patterns. Here we report on analyses of species composition - environment relationships among different taxonomic groups in two continents, and the components of such relationships, in the contiguous USA and Australia.

The role of abiotic environmental conditions and herbivory in shaping bacterial community composition in floral nectar.

Identifying the processes that drive community assembly has long been a central theme in ecology. For microorganisms, a traditional prevailing hypothesis states that "everything is everywhere, but the environment selects". Although the bacterial community in floral nectar may be affected by both atmosphere (air-borne bacteria) and animals as dispersal vectors, the environmental and geographic factors that shape microbial communities in floral nectar are unknown.

Environmental heterogeneity affects the location of modelled communities along the niche-neutrality continuum.

The continuum hypothesis has been proposed as a means to reconcile the contradiction between the niche and neutral theories. While past research has shown that species richness affects the location of communities along the niche-neutrality continuum, there may be extrinsic forces at play as well. We used a spatially explicit continuum model to quantify the effects of environmental heterogeneity, comprising abundance distribution and spatial configuration of resources, on the degree of community neutrality.

Land use planning and wildfire: development policies influence future probability of housing loss.

Increasing numbers of homes are being destroyed by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface. With projections of climate change and housing growth potentially exacerbating the threat of wildfire to homes and property, effective fire-risk reduction alternatives are needed as part of a comprehensive fire management plan. Land use planning represents a shift in traditional thinking from trying to eliminate wildfires, or even increasing resilience to them, toward avoiding exposure to them through the informed placement of new residential structures.

Using structure locations as a basis for mapping the wildland urban interface.

The wildland urban interface (WUI) delineates the areas where wildland fire hazard most directly impacts human communities and threatens lives and property, and where houses exert the strongest influence on the natural environment. Housing data are a major problem for WUI mapping. When housing data are zonal, the concept of a WUI neighborhood can be captured easily in a density measure, but variations in zone (census block) size and shape introduce bias.

Trends in ecological research during the last three decades--a systematic review.

It is thought that the science of ecology has experienced conceptual shifts in recent decades, chiefly from viewing nature as static and balanced to a conception of constantly changing, unpredictable, complex ecosystems. Here, we ask if these changes are reflected in actual ecological research over the last 30 years. We surveyed 750 articles from the entire pool of ecological literature and 750 articles from eight leading journals.

Housing arrangement and location determine the likelihood of housing loss due to wildfire.

Surging wildfires across the globe are contributing to escalating residential losses and have major social, economic, and ecological consequences. The highest losses in the U.S.

Multiscale analyses of mammal species composition--environment relationship in the contiguous USA.

Relationships between species composition and its environmental determinants are a basic objective of ecology. Such relationships are scale dependent, and predictors of species composition typically include variables such as climate, topographic, historical legacies, land uses, human population levels, and random processes. Our objective was to quantify the effect of environmental determinants on U.