This is a little bit of a bandwagon – the ‘retrospective’ post at the end of the year – but this one is not merely a rehash I’ve stuff I’ve already covered.
I decided that it would be worthwhile to cover some of the ‘big’ conservation papers of 2013 as ranked by F1000 Prime. For copyright reasons, I can’t divulge the entire synopsis of each paper, but I can give you a brief run-down of the papers that caught the eye of fellow F1000 faculty members and me. If you don’t subscribe to F1000, then you’ll have to settle with my briefest of abstracts.
In no particular order then, here are some of the conservation papers that made a splash (positively, negatively or controversially) in 2013:
- Recovery of an isolated coral reef system following severe disturbance – “As the world watches with dismay at the loss of shallow water corals, this article provides stunning proof that recovery of coral reefs can be surprisingly fast and complete…”
- Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species -“This is the first dedicated, large (country) scale analysis of the relationship between tree diversity and the provision of multiple ecosystem services by forests…” (covered previously on CB.com)
- Global meta-analysis reveals no net change in local-scale plant biodiversity over time – As a result [of the species-area relationship], there’s not necessarily a direct link between the global extinction of a species and the numbers of species observed in a smaller sampling area…”
- Conservation efforts may increase malaria burden in the Brazilian Amazon – “… increasing amounts of protected areas within a 10-30km radius of a city increases the incidence of malaria in the Brazilian Amazon…”
- Global effects of local human population density and distance to markets on the condition of coral reef fisheries – “… [coral fish] biomass decreased exponentially with decreasing distance to markets…”
- Evolutionary rescue from extinction is contingent on a lower rate of environmental change – “… increased rates of environmental change led to increased rates of extinction, due not only to the loss of mutational opportunities because of reduced populations but also due to the loss of potentiating mutations that would be selected under milder conditions…”
- The risk of marine bioinvasion caused by global shipping – “… model marine bioinvasions, identify hotspots and major pathways for marine biotic invasions, predict the most vulnerable specific ports and general ecological regions, and test their predictions against reported invasions…”
- High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change – “In addition to identifying areas of deforestation and forest regrowth across geographic regions and ecosystems, their results also present an exceptional opportunity to examine the causes of forest loss, how policy shapes forest preservation, the status of intact natural forests in areas where they protect biodiversity, and many other important environmental issues…”
- Carbon pools recover more quickly than plant biodiversity in tropical secondary forests – “… confirms … that biodiversity is nearly always in better shape in primary tropical forests compared to re-generated ones, [and] that soil carbon and species composition never really comes back in the same way…” (covered previously on CB.com)
- Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years – “… fire frequency is higher in recent decades than at any time in the last several thousand years – essentially since the modern boreal forest was established…”
- Diversity loss with persistent human disturbance increases vulnerability to ecosystem collapse – “… the relationship between ecosystem stability and diversity may, in some cases, be either a non-linear function of the magnitude of environmental disturbances, or vary qualitatively with the type of disturbance…”
- Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict – “… for every one standard deviation in climate change (increased temperature or increased rainfall), the frequencies of interpersonal and intergroup conflict rise by 4% and 14%, respectively…”
- Signature of ocean warming in global fisheries catch – “… the ‘mean temperature of the catch’ … is a combination of species’ temperature preferences weighted by fish catch according to the division of the ocean into large marine ecosystems … most [large marine ecosystems] show increases to the [mean temperature of the catch] from 1970-2006 of about 0.2 C° per decade…”
- Plant-pollinator interactions over 120 years: loss of species, co-occurrence, and function – “… a large proportion of the past interactions between plants and their insect pollinators in Carlinville, Illinios, have been lost over the last 120 years, largely due to the extinction of bee species and changes to the spatial and temporal co-occurrence of the interactors…”
- Plant invasions and extinction debts – “This paper uses a combination of metapopulation modelling and field experiments to show that, for a suite of Californian native grasses, extinction due to competition from invasive grasses is a real possibility – it just takes time…”
- Europe’s other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions – “… current red lists are best described by what humans did 50 to 100 years ago rather than what they are doing now…”
- Synergistic effects of non-Apis bees and honey bees for pollination services – “… provides a very nice demonstration of how diversity in pollinator species synergistically enhances the total pollination in almond orchards…”
- Global decline in large old trees – “… the authors … trace the decline and wholesale removal of [large old trees] in a variety of forested and savanna ecosystems. In some cases, this erosion can be extremely rapid where forests are recently fragmented and the most valuable older trees are accessible. Excessive logging and inappropriate fire regimes are two major causes of this decline…”
ConservationBytes.com 
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