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Journal articleBarraclough TG, Humphreys AM, 2015,
The evolutionary reality of species and higher taxa in plants: a survey of post-modern opinion and evidence
, NEW PHYTOLOGIST, Vol: 207, Pages: 291-296, ISSN: 0028-646X- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 31
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Journal articleMilner-Gulland EJ, Sainsbury K, Burgess N, et al., 2015,
Exploring stakeholder perceptions of conservation outcomes from alternative income generating activities in Tanzanian villages adjacent to Eastern Arc mountain forests.
, Biological Conservation, Vol: 191, Pages: 20-28, ISSN: 0006-3207 -
Journal articleMilner-Gulland EJ, Wallace A, Bunnefeld N, et al., 2015,
Quantifying the short-term costs of conservation interventions for fishers at Lake Alaotra, Madagascar
, PLOS One, Vol: 10, ISSN: 1932-6203Artisanal fisheries are a key source of food and income for millions of people, but if poorly managed, fishing can have declining returns as well as impacts on biodiversity. Management interventions such as spatial and temporal closures can improve fishery sustainability and reduce environmental degradation, but may carry substantial short-term costs for fishers. The Lake Alaotra wetland in Madagascar supports a commercially important artisanal fishery and provides habitat for a Critically Endangered primate and other endemic wildlife of conservation importance. Using detailed data from more than 1,600 fisher catches, we used linear mixed effects models to explore and quantify relationships between catch weight, effort, and spatial and temporal restrictions to identify drivers of fisher behaviour and quantify the potential effect of fishing restrictions on catch. We found that restricted area interventions and fishery closures would generate direct short-term costs through reduced catch and income, and these costs vary between groups of fishers using different gear. Our results show that conservation interventions can have uneven impacts on local people with different fishing strategies. This information can be used to formulate management strategies that minimise the adverse impacts of interventions, increase local support and compliance, and therefore maximise conservation effectiveness.
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Journal articleMilner-Gulland EJ, mcnamara J, rowcliffe M, et al., 2015,
Long-term spatio-temporal changes in a West African bushmeat trade system
, Conservation Biology, Vol: 29, Pages: 1446-1457, ISSN: 0888-8892Landscapes in many developing countries consist of a heterogeneous matrix of mixed agriculture and forest. Many of the generalist species in this matrix are increasingly traded in the bushmeat markets of West and Central Africa. However, to date there has been little quantification of how the spatial configuration of the landscape influences the urban bushmeat trade over time. As anthropogenic landscapes become the face of rural West Africa, understanding the dynamics of these systems has important implications for conservation and landscape management. The bushmeat production of an area is likely to be defined by landscape characteristics such as habitat disturbance, hunting pressure, level of protection, and distance to market. We explored (SSG, tense) the role of these four characteristics in the spatio-temporal dynamics of the commercial bushmeat trade around the city of Kumasi, Ghana, over 27 years (1978 to 2004). We used geographic information system methods to generate maps delineating the spatial characteristics of the landscapes. These data were combined with spatially explicit market data collected in the main fresh bushmeat market in Kumasi to explore the relationship between trade volume (measured in terms of number of carcasses) and landscape characteristics. Over time, rodents, specifically cane rats (Thryonomys swinderianus), became more abundant in the trade relative to ungulates and the catchment area of the bushmeat market expanded. Areas of intermediate disturbance supplied more bushmeat, but protected areas had no effect. Heavily hunted areas showed significant declines in bushmeat supply over time. Our results highlight the role that low intensity, heterogeneous agricultural landscapes can play in providing ecosystem services, such as bushmeat, and therefore the importance of incorporating bushmeat into ecosystem service mapping exercises. Our results also indicate that even where high bushmeat production is possible, current harvest levels may
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Journal articleHui T-YJ, Burt A, 2015,
Estimating effective population size from temporally spaced samples with a novel, efficient maximum-likelihood algorithm
, Genetics, Vol: 200, Pages: 285-293, ISSN: 1943-2631The effective population size Embedded Image is a key parameter in population genetics and evolutionary biology, as it quantifies the expected distribution of changes in allele frequency due to genetic drift. Several methods of estimating Embedded Image have been described, the most direct of which uses allele frequencies measured at two or more time points. A new likelihood-based estimator Embedded Image for contemporary effective population size using temporal data is developed in this article. The existing likelihood methods are computationally intensive and unable to handle the case when the underlying Embedded Image is large. This article tries to work around this problem by using a hidden Markov algorithm and applying continuous approximations to allele frequencies and transition probabilities. Extensive simulations are run to evaluate the performance of the proposed estimator Embedded Image, and the results show that it is more accurate and has lower variance than previous methods. The new estimator also reduces the computational time by at least 1000-fold and relaxes the upper bound of Embedded Image to several million, hence allowing the estimation of larger Embedded Image. Finally, we demonstrate how this algorithm can cope with nonconstant Embedded Image scenarios and be used as a likelihood-ratio test to test for the equality of Embedded Image throughout the sampling horizon. An R package “NB” is now available for download to implement the method described in this article.
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Journal articleFiegna F, Moreno-Letelier A, Bell T, et al., 2015,
Evolution of species interactions determines microbial community productivity in new environments
, ISME JOURNAL, Vol: 9, Pages: 1235-1245, ISSN: 1751-7362- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 92
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Journal articleWoodhouse E, Mills MA, McGowan PJK, et al., 2015,
Religious Relationships with the Environment in a Tibetan Rural Community: Interactions and Contrasts with Popular Notions of Indigenous Environmentalism
, HUMAN ECOLOGY, Vol: 43, Pages: 295-307, ISSN: 0300-7839- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 29
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Journal articleMaxwell SL, Milner-Gulland EJ, Jones JPG, et al., 2015,
Being smart about SMART environmental targets
, SCIENCE, Vol: 347, Pages: 1075-1076, ISSN: 0036-8075- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 68
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Journal articleMartinez-Garcia LB, Richardson SJ, Tylianakis JM, et al., 2015,
Host identity is a dominant driver of mycorrhizal fungal community composition during ecosystem development
, NEW PHYTOLOGIST, Vol: 205, Pages: 1565-1576, ISSN: 0028-646X- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 148
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Journal articlePeralta G, Frost CM, Didham RK, et al., 2015,
Phylogenetic diversity and co-evolutionary signals among trophic levels change across a habitat edge
, JOURNAL OF ANIMAL ECOLOGY, Vol: 84, Pages: 364-372, ISSN: 0021-8790- Author Web Link
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- Citations: 18
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