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A general biodiversity-function relationship is mediated by trophic level

Nature-based solutions: Lessons from around the world

This paper considers an emerging group of coastal management approaches which offer the potential to reduce coastal flood and erosion risks whilst also providing nature conservation, aesthetic and amenity benefits. These solutions mimic the characteristics of natural features, but are enhanced or created by man to provide specific services such as wave energy dissipation and erosion reduction.

A mammoth undertaking: harnessing insight from functional ecology to shape de-extinction priority setting

1. De-extinction, or the process of resurrecting extinct species, has been advanced as a promising new tool in conservation biology. Most scientific discussion of de-extinction has thus far focused on the methodology and ethics of bringing once-extinct species back to life. We ask: How can de-extinction be strategically shaped into a service that maximally benefits ecological communities and ecosystems? 2. Ecologists often indicate that the worst facet of extinction is the associated loss of ecological function.

Global threats from invasive alien species in the twenty-first century and national response capacities

Invasive alien species (IAS) threaten human livelihoods and biodiversity globally. Increasing globalization facilitates IAS arrival, and environmental changes, including climate change, facilitate IAS establishment. Here we provide the first global, spatial analysis of the terrestrial threat from IAS in light of twenty-first century globalization and environmental change, and evaluate national capacities to prevent and manage species invasions.

Mapping Uncertainty Due to Missing Data in the Global Ocean Health Index

Indicators are increasingly used to measure environmental systems; however, they are often criticized for failing to measure and describe uncertainty. Uncertainty is particularly difficult to evaluate and communicate in the case of composite indicators which aggregate many indicators of ecosystem condition. One of the ongoing goals of the Ocean Health Index (OHI) has been to improve our approach to dealing with missing data, which is a major source of uncertainty.

ProvONE: extending PROV to support the DataONE scientific community

The DataONE federated data network has adopted and extended the PROV model to support the collection, storage, indexing, and user browsing of the provenance of data packages stored in its member nodes. The PROV extension, ProvONE, adds provenance elements (entity and relationships types) for describing process structure alongside the data dependencies that originate from process execution. The ProvONE model was defined in 2015 and its specification is available online, while provenance support based on the model is now (2016) in its pre-production phase.

The environment ontology in 2016: bridging domains with increased scope, semantic density, and interoperation

The Environment Ontology (ENVO; http://www.environmentontology.org/), first described in 2013, is a resource and research target for the semantically controlled description of environmental entities. The ontology's initial aim was the representation of the biomes, environmental features, and environmental materials pertinent to genomic and microbiome-related investigations. However, the need for environmental semantics is common to a multitude of fields, and ENVO's use has steadily grown since its initial description.

Coastal wetlands and flood damage reduction: Using industry-based models to assess natural defenses in the northeastern USA

Averaged 30-year climate change projections mask opportunities for species establishment

Survival of early life stages is key for population expansion into new locations and for persistence of current populations (Grubb 1977, Harper 1977). Relative to adults, these early life stages are very sensitive to climate fluctuations (Ropert-Coudert et al. 2015), which often drive episodic or ‘event-limited’ regeneration (e.g. pulses) in long-lived plant species (Jackson et al. 2009). us, it is difficult to mechanistically associate 30-yr climate norms to dynamic processes involved in species range shifts (e.g.

California forests show early indications of both range shifts and local persistence under climate change

Forest regeneration data provide an early signal of the persistence and migration of tree species, so we investigated whether species shifts due to climate change exhibit a common signal of response or whether changes vary by species.