Another year, another arbitrary retrospective list – but I’m still going to do it. Based on the popularity of last year’s retrospective list of influential conservation papers as assessed through F1000 Prime, here are 20 conservation papers published in 2014 that impressed the Faculty members.
Once again for copyright reasons, I can’t give the whole text but I’ve given the links to the F1000 assessments (if you’re a subscriber) and of course, to the papers themselves. I did not order these based on any particular criterion.
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- Assemblage time series reveal biodiversity change but not systematic loss – This substitution of taxa, rather than a systematic loss of diversity at local scales, provides strong evidence for the development of novel ecosystem compositions in ecosystems across the globe, with important implications for management and changes in the delivery of ecosystem goods and services ...
- Social equity matters in payments for ecosystem services – … attempts to govern ecosystem service provision with efficiency-based PES schemes risk failure if they fail to consider these [social equity] feedbacks …
- Tropical forests in the Anthropocene – … review deforestation, climate change, defaunation and other processes driving forest change … they also discuss interactions between these processes and the considerable heterogeneity the severity of the different processes …
- Impacts of recreational fishing in Australia: historical declines, self-regulation and evidence of an early warning system – … discovered that as reported captures of these species declined, concerns regarding declining fish populations were increasingly raised … Protective legislation was eventually enacted for both blue groper and grey nurse sharks, but regulations occurred many years (17 and 19 years, respectively) after the spearfishing community raised initial concerns …
- Changing the intellectual climate – … critically important questions about fundamental questions of value, responsibility, rights, entitlements, needs, duty, faith, care, government, cruelty, charity and justice are under-represented in global environmental change science …
- Emergent global patterns of ecosystem structure and function from a mechanistic general ecosystem model – … a milestone in ecological modelling for its scale, scope and ambition in establishing Global Ecosystem Models as a credible approach …
- Global conservation outcomes depend on marine protected areas with five key features – … shows how protected area effects attenuate quickly if less than four of five features (no-take, enforced, old, large and isolated) are met …
- Global assessment of the status of coral reef herbivorous fishes: evidence for fishing effects – … not only is fishing reducing herbivore capacity to reduce algal growth on coral reefs but is additionally promoting algal growth by indirectly benefitting the species that farm algae …
- Common European birds are declining rapidly while less abundant species’ numbers are rising – … especially from the perspective of ecosystem functioning (and ecosystem services), a decline of the most common species is particularly concerning.
- Scuba diving damage and intensity of tourist activities increases coral disease prevalence – … found that injury associated with divers results in threefold higher rates of coral disease …
- Remaining natural vegetation in the global biodiversity hotspots – … hotspots retain 3,545,975 km² of natural intact vegetation, or just 14.9% of their original extent … they are generally much more perturbed than previously thought. Of the 20 hotspots with ≥ 20% of such vegetation, now only seven of them have this much … ; there are now 17 hotspots with ≤ 10% natural intact vegetation …
- Long-term increase in aboveground carbon stocks following exclusion of grazers and forest establishment in an alpine ecosystem – … grazing is a major impediment to forest regrowth in Norway, and that short-term changes in vegetation structure after grazing do not reflect the long-term capacity of regenerating systems to acquire and store carbon.
- The effectiveness of coral reefs for coastal hazard risk reduction and adaptation – … coral reefs protect against natural hazards by reducing wave energy by an average of 97% … costs of reef restoration are lower than costs of artificial barriers, work as well at shoreline protection, play other positive roles in terms of ecosystem services, and are living, dynamic structures that can recover naturally following damage …
- Cichlid species-area relationships are shaped by adaptive radiations that scale with area – … estimate that radiations are an order of magnitude more powerful in generating species richness than simple immigration …
- Time preferences and the management of coral reef fisheries – … a paper that heralds the emergence of a fusion between conservation science and behavioural economics.
- New conservation is true conservation – … that funding and methods for conservation do not typically equate to a zero-sum game, and indeed we can use quite different approaches to appeal to various stakeholders …, without compromising our broader principles or goals.
- Ecosystem services as a contested concept: a synthesis of critique and counter-arguments – … a nicely structured, balanced assessment of seven areas of disagreement in the field of ecosystem services research.
- Land-use impacts on plant-pollinator networks: interaction strength and specialization predict pollinator declines – … land-use intensity did not cause pollinator decline directly, but instead indirectly affected pollinator community composition by causing declines in pollinator species reliant on plant species that are sensitive to land use.
- Recovery and resilience of tropical forests after disturbance – … recovery was faster following ‘large infrequent events’, which are natural perturbations such as cyclones and major fires. While most past disturbances were caused by humans clearing forest, the fact that tropical forest systems were most resilient to ‘natural’ events means that if we cannot stop human disturbances, at least we can attempt to emulate natural processes to maximise the rebound potential.
- Infectious diseases and their outbreaks in Asia-pacific: biodiversity and its regulation loss matter – … to test two predictions: (1) that the number of infectious disease should increase as overall biodiversity increases and (2) that biodiversity loss, inferred from species threat and deforestation data, should increase the number of infectious disease outbreaks in humans. … they confirmed both predictions.
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ConservationBytes.com 
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Reblogged this on GarryRogers Nature Conservation and commented:
Useful information to add to your reading list. Thanks to Professor Bradshaw.
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