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Reviewing the evidence for risk reduction by natural coastal habitats world wide: When and where they have worked

Coastal risk reduction strategies world-wide face multiple challenges: rising sea-levels, more frequent flooding, greater exposure and increasingly threatened natural coastal habitats. Over the last three to four decades, a body of evidence has been growing that indicates that coastal habitats can be managed alongside artificial defenses to reduce the risk of flooding. Many countries are moving towards approaches that use more natural and nature-based approaches for risk reduction.

Principles for managing marine ecosystems prone to tipping points

As climatic changes and human uses intensify, resource managers and other decision makers are taking actions to either avoid or respond to ecosystem tipping points, or dramatic shifts in structure and function that are often costly and hard to reverse. Evidence indicates that explicitly addressing tipping points leads to improved management outcomes. Drawing on theory and examples from marine systems, we distill a set of seven principles to guide effective management in ecosystems with tipping points, derived from the best available science.

A general consumer-resource population model

Food-web dynamics arise from predator-prey, parasite-host, and herbivore-plant interactions. Models for such interactions include up to three consumer activity states (questing, attacking, consuming) and up to four resource response states (susceptible, exposed, ingested, resistant). Articulating these states into a general model allows for dissecting, comparing, and deriving consumer-resource models.

Species sorting and patch dynamics in harlequin metacommunities affect the relative importance of environment and space

A global, remote sensing-based characterization of terrestrial habitat heterogeneity for biodiversity and ecosystem modelling

Characterizing driver-response relationships in marine pelagic ecosystems for improved ocean management

Using community-level metrics to monitor the effects of marine protected areas on biodiversity

Geographic variation in plant community structure of salt marshes: Species, functional and phylogenetic perspectives

Threat of plastic pollution to seabirds is global, pervasive, and increasing

Plastic pollution in the ocean is a global concern; concentrations reach 580,000 pieces per km2 and production is increasing exponentially. Although a large number of empirical studies provide emerging evidence of impacts to wildlife, there has been little systematic assessment of risk. We performed a spatial risk analysis using predicted debris distributions and ranges for 186 seabird species to model debris exposure. We adjusted the model using published data on plastic ingestion by seabirds.

Gene flow and natural selection shape spatial patterns of genes in tree population: Implication for evolutionary processes and applications