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Mass releases of two parasitoid species, Aphidius matricariae and Ephedrus cerasicola, may provide an alternative measure to pesticides to control the rosy apple aphid Dysaphis plantaginea in organic apple orchards. As a proof of concept study, we tested if the presence of flower strips between apple tree rows could improve the action of three early parasitoid releases—and of other naturally present aphid enemies—on the control of aphid colonies and number of aphids per tree. Apple trees located at different distances from parasitoid release points were monitored in plots with and without flower strips in an organic apple orchard over two years, along the season of aphid infestation (March to July). Our case study demonstrated that the presence of flowering plant mixes in the alleyways of an apple orchard improved the biological control of D. plantaginea, with an effect size of 33.4% less aphids in plots with flower strips, compared to plots without flower strips, at the infestation peak date. We also showed a negative effect of higher distance to parasitoid release points on aphid control, but our results at the infestation peak date suggest that the presence of flowers could marginally compensate for the detrimental effect of distance, probably by improving the persistence and dispersal capacities of natural enemies. Despite high variations in aphid population dynamics between years, we conclude that combining flower strips with early parasitoid releases in apple orchards is promising for biological control of the rosy apple aphid, although the method merits to be further refined and repeated in more orchards.

International audience; Gorilla tourism supports the protection of its ecosystem, benefiting humans and wildlife populations living therein. Assessing to what degree the presence and proximity of tourists affect wildlife aids long-term benefits. Because wild animals might see human activities as stressors, we hypothesized that the increased presence and proximity of tourists leads to immediate changes in gorilla social cohesion. We constructed social networks from association rates before, during, and after tourist visits, and when tourists were very close (≤3 m) or close (>3 m) to them. Our analysis focused on this distance threshold (≤3 m and >3 m) because the 7 m rule, enforced by the national park, was violated 84% of the time. We showed that gorillas spent more time in closer association after tourists arrived and when tourists were

To mitigate the shortage of natural breeding sites in cities, nest-boxes are provided for cavity-nesters. However, these are not the breeding sites these animals originally evolved in and optimised their breeding performance to. It thus remains inconclusive if nest-boxes can provide adequate substitutes, ensuring equivalent fitness returns for breeding animals. Additionally, the majority of knowledge on the ecology of urban birds comes from nest-box populations, but no study to date directly compared fitness consequences of breeding inside nest-boxes in relation to natural-cavities in an urban context. This limits our understanding of the urban ecology of cavity-nesters and addressing its functional meaning. We investigate fitness consequences and life-history trait variation according to the nesting site type to provide a comprehensive understanding of conservation potential of nest-boxes in cities and to support/question generalisations stemming from nest-box studies on urbanization. We directly compare the reproductive performance of two small passerines, blue tits and great tits, breeding in nest-boxes as opposed to natural-cavities in a seminatural forest of a capital city using a quasi-experimental setting. We show that the effects of nest type vary between species: in blue tits, fitness proxies were negatively affected by nest-boxes (lower fledging success and fledgling numbers, longer time spent in nest and later fledging date in comparison to natural-cavities), while great tit performance appeared to be unaffected by nest type. We detected that both species breeding in nest-boxes accelerated incubation onset, but since there were no major differences in pre-hatching traits (lay date, clutch size, hatching rates) between the nest types, we attribute the fitness deterioration to post-hatching effects. Interestingly, overall breeding density of tits in urban natural-cavities was higher than observed in a primeval habitat. Nest-boxes may become an ecological trap for some species and the unaffected species can consequently outcompete them, decreasing overall biodiversity in cities. We highlight the ecological importance of old-growth tree stands, providing natural tree cavities for city-breeding animals. Due to the detected nest type-dependent variation in reproductive performance, we support the criticism regarding the unconditional extrapolation of evolutionary and ecological interpretations of nest-box studies to general populations.

Global freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and meeting the challenges of this crisis requires bold goals and the mobilisation of substantial resources. While the reasons are varied, investments in both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind those in the terrestrial and marine realms. Inspired by a global consultation, we identify 15 pressing priority needs, grouped into five research areas, in an effort to support informed stewardship of freshwater biodiversity. The proposed agenda aims to advance freshwater biodiversity research globally as a critical step in improving coordinated actions towards its sustainable management and conservation. ispartof: ECOLOGY LETTERS vol:25 issue:2 pages:255-263 ispartof: location:England status: published

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens conservation and biosecurity efforts. The Internet has greatly facilitated the trade of wildlife, and researchers have increasingly examined the Internet to uncover illegal trade. However, most efforts to locate illegal trade on the Internet are targeted to one or few taxa or products. Large-scale efforts to find illegal wildlife on the Internet (e-commerce, social media, dark web) may be facilitated by a systematic compilation of illegally traded wildlife taxa and their uses. Here, we provide such a dataset. We used seizure records from three global wildlife trade databases to compile the identity of seized taxa along with their intended usage (i.e., use-type). Our dataset includes c. 4.9k distinct taxa representing c. 3.3k species and contains c. 11k taxa-use combinations from 110 unique use-types. Further, we acquired over 45k common names for seized taxa from over 100 languages. Our dataset can be used to conduct large-scale broad searches of the Internet to find illegally traded wildlife. Further, our dataset can be filtered for more targeted searches of specific taxa or derived products.

Citizen science platforms are quickly accumulating hundreds of millions of biodiversity observations around the world annually. Quantifying and correcting for the biases in citizen science datasets remains an important first step before these data are used to address ecological questions and monitor biodiversity. One source of potential bias among datasets is the difference between those citizen science programs that have unstructured protocols and those that have semi-structured or structured protocols for submitting observations. To quantify biases in an unstructured citizen science platform, we contrasted bird observations from the unstructured iNaturalist platform with that from a semi-structured citizen science platform—eBird—for the continental United States. We tested whether four traits of species (body size, commonness, flock size, and color) predicted if a species was under- or over-represented in the unstructured dataset compared with the semi-structured dataset. We found strong evidence that large-bodied birds were over-represented in the unstructured citizen science dataset; moderate evidence that common species were over-represented in the unstructured dataset; strong evidence that species in large groups were over-represented; and no evidence that colorful species were over-represented in unstructured citizen science data. Our results suggest that biases exist in unstructured citizen science data when compared with semi-structured data, likely as a result of the detectability of a species and the inherent recording process. Importantly, in programs like iNaturalist the detectability process is two-fold—first, an individual organism needs to be detected, and second, it needs to be photographed, which is likely easier for many large-bodied species. Our results indicate that caution is warranted when using unstructured citizen science data in ecological modelling, and highlight body size as a fundamental trait that can be used as a covariate for modelling opportunistic species occurrence records, representing the detectability or identifiability in unstructured citizen science datasets. Future research in this space should continue to focus on quantifying and documenting biases in citizen science data, and expand our research by including structured citizen science data to understand how biases differ among unstructured, semi-structured, and structured citizen science platforms.

International audience; Identifying the impacts of anthropogenic fires on biodiversity is imperative for human-influenced tropical rainforests because: i) these ecosystems have been transformed by human-induced fires for millennia; and ii) their effective management is essential for protecting the world's terrestrial biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. While several short-term studies elucidate the impacts of fires on local plant diversity, how plant diversity responds to fire regimes over long timescales (>100 years) is a significant knowledge gap, posing substantial impediment to evidence-based management of tropical social-ecological systems. Using wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats of India as a model system, we discuss the synergistic effects of anthropogenic fires and enhanced aridity on tropical plant diversity over the past 4000 years by examining fossil pollen-based diversity indices (e.g., pollen richness and evenness, and temporal β-diversity), past fire management, the intervals of enhanced aridity due to reduced monsoon rainfall and land use history. By developing a historical perspective, our aim is to provide region-specific management information for biodiversity conservation in the Western Ghats. We observe that the agroforestry landscape switches between periods of no fires (4000-1800 yr BP, and 1400-400 yr BP) and fires (1800-1400 yr BP, and 400-0 yr BP), with both fire periods concomitant with intervals of enhanced aridity. We find synergistic impacts of anthropogenic fires and aridity on plant diversity uneven across time, pointing towards varied land management strategies implemented by the contemporary societies. For example, during 1800–1400 yr BP, diversity reduced in conjunction with a significant decrease in the canopy cover related to sustained use of fires, possibly linked to large-scale intensification of agriculture. On the contrary, the substantially reduced fires during 400–0 yr BP may be associated with the emergence of sacred forest groves, a cultural practice supporting the maintenance of plant diversity. Overall, notwithstanding apparent changes in fires, aridity, and land use over the past 4000 years, present-day plant diversity in the Western Ghats agroforestry landscape falls within the range of historical variability. Importantly, we find a strong correlation between plant diversity and canopy cover, emphasising the crucial role of maintenance of trees in the landscape for biodiversity conservation. Systematic tree management in tropical social-ecological systems is vital for livelihoods of billions of people, who depend on forested landscapes. In this context, we argue that agroforestry landscapes can deliver win-win solutions for biodiversity as well as people in the Western Ghats and wet tropics at large.

There is an urgent need for a change in research workflows so that pre-existing knowledge is better utilised in designing new research. A formal assessment of the accumulated knowledge prior to research approval would reduce the waste of already limited resources caused by asking low priority questions.

The advent of Next Generation Sequencing has reduced sequencing costs and increased genomic projects from a huge amount of organismal taxa, generating an unprecedented amount of genomic datasets publicly available. Often, only a tiny fraction of outstanding relevance of the genome data produced by researchers is used in their works. This fact allows the data generated to be recycled in further projects worldwide. The assembly of complete mitogenomes is frequently overlooked though it is useful to understand evolutionary relationships among taxa, especially those presenting poor mtDNA sampling at the level of genera and families. This is exactly the case for ants (Hymenoptera:Formicidae) and more specifically for the subfamily Pseudomyrmecinae, a group of arboreal ants with several cases of convergent coevolution without any complete mitochondrial sequence available. In this work, we assembled, annotated and performed comparative genomics analyses of 14 new complete mitochondria from Pseudomyrmecinae species relying solely on public datasets available from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). We used all complete mitogenomes available for ants to study the gene order conservation and also to generate two phylogenetic trees using both (i) concatenated set of 13 mitochondrial genes and (ii) the whole mitochondrial sequences. Even though the tree topologies diverged subtly from each other (and from previous studies), our results confirm several known relationships and generate new evidences for sister clade classification inside Pseudomyrmecinae clade. We also performed a synteny analysis for Formcidae and identified possible sites in which nucleotidic insertions happened in mitogenomes of pseudomyrmecine ants. Using a data mining/bioinformatics approach, the current work increased the number of complete mitochondrial genomes available for ants from 15 to 29, demonstrating the unique potential of public databases for mitogenomics studies. The wide applications of mitogenomes in research and presence of mitochondrial data in different public dataset types makes the “no budget mitogenomics” approach ideal for comprehensive molecular studies, especially for subsampled taxa.