ORCID Profile
0000-0001-8823-9101
Current Organisation
Penn State Altoona
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 25-07-2012
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE11318
Abstract: The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global bio ersity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their bio ersity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of bio ersity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative s le of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of bio ersity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious bio ersity declines.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-06-2019
DOI: 10.1002/FEE.2057
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2009
DOI: 10.1071/MU08053
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-05-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 29-05-2019
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 04-2019
Abstract: Avian ersification has been influenced by global climate change, plate tectonic movements, and mass extinction events. However, the impact of these factors on the ersification of the hyper erse perching birds (passerines) is unclear because family level relationships are unresolved and the timing of splitting events among lineages is uncertain. We analyzed DNA data from 4,060 nuclear loci and 137 passerine families using concatenation and coalescent approaches to infer a comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis that clarifies relationships among all passerine families. Then, we calibrated this phylogeny using 13 fossils to examine the effects of different events in Earth history on the timing and rate of passerine ersification. Our analyses reconcile passerine ersification with the fossil and geological records suggest that passerines originated on the Australian landmass ∼47 Ma and show that subsequent dispersal and ersification of passerines was affected by a number of climatological and geological events, such as Oligocene glaciation and inundation of the New Zealand landmass. Although passerine ersification rates fluctuated throughout the Cenozoic, we find no link between the rate of passerine ersification and Cenozoic global temperature, and our analyses show that the increases in passerine ersification rate we observe are disconnected from the colonization of new continents. Taken together, these results suggest more complex mechanisms than temperature change or ecological opportunity have controlled macroscale patterns of passerine speciation.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2004
DOI: 10.1071/MU03054
Location: United States of America
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Andrew L. Mack.