Review

Authors: Bradley J Cardinale, J Emmett Duffy, Andrew Gonzalez...

The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9 million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world's nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth's ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.

Topics: Animals; Biodiversity; Climate Change; Consensus; Ecology; Extinction, Biological; Human Activities; Humans

PubMed: 22678280
DOI: 10.1038/nature11148

Authors: Kevin J Gaston, Masashi Soga, James P Duffy...

The field of ecology has focused on understanding characteristics of natural systems in a manner as free as possible from biases of human observers. However, demand is growing for knowledge of human-nature interactions at the level of individual people. This is particularly driven by concerns around human health consequences due to changes in positive and negative interactions. This requires attention to the biased ways in which people encounter and experience other organisms. Here we define such a 'personalised ecology', and discuss its connections to other aspects of the field. We propose a framework of focal research topics, shaped by whether the unit of analysis is a single person, a single population, or multiple populations, and whether a human or nature perspective is foremost.

Topics: Ecology; Ecosystem; Humans

PubMed: 30449304
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2018.09.012

Authors: M Husemann, F E Zachos, R J Paxton...

Topics: Animals; Ecology; Evolution, Molecular; Genetics, Population; Linkage Disequilibrium; Models, Genetic; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; Population Density

PubMed: 27553454
DOI: 10.1038/hdy.2016.75

Authors: F Pelletier, D Garant, A P Hendry...

Evolutionary ecologists and population biologists have recently considered that ecological and evolutionary changes are intimately linked and can occur on the same time-scale. Recent theoretical developments have shown how the feedback between ecological and evolutionary dynamics can be linked, and there are now empirical demonstrations showing that ecological change can lead to rapid evolutionary change. We also have evidence that microevolutionary change can leave an ecological signature. We are at a stage where the integration of ecology and evolution is a necessary step towards major advances in our understanding of the processes that shape and maintain biodiversity. This special feature about 'eco-evolutionary dynamics' brings together biologists from empirical and theoretical backgrounds to bridge the gap between ecology and evolution and provide a series of contributions aimed at quantifying the interactions between these fundamental processes.

Topics: Biological Evolution; Ecology; Ecosystem; Environment; Genotype; Population Dynamics; Selection, Genetic

PubMed: 19414463
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0027

Authors: Yong-Gang Yao, Hua Shen

Located at the head of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, the Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), serves as China's main center for research into the diverse animal and ecological resources of southwestern China, Eastern Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. As of October 2019, it has been 60 years since the inception of KIZ. Since 1959, strong roots have been laid down by generations of researchers, allowing KIZ to grow and evolve into a comprehensive research institution renowned for its remarkable achievements in evolutionary mechanisms of animal biodiversity, animal resources protection, and sustainable utilization. It is now recognized as "" and is"" (Overseas Experts Review Committee, organized by the Bureau of Development Planning, CAS, during international evaluation in 2014).To celebrate the 60th anniversary of KIZ and the 70th anniversary of CAS, presents this commemorative issue, composed primarily of contributions from KIZ researchers. In addition, it is our great honor to provide here a brief retrospective of the pioneering work undertaken by the earlier scientists at KIZ and recent achievements, which will hopefully serve to motivate and inspire present and future successors.

Topics: Animals; China; Ecology; Ecosystem; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Research

PubMed: 31631589
DOI: 10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2019.060

Review

Authors: Maxwell J Farrell, Nicolas Le Guillarme, Liam Brierley...

In ecology and evolutionary biology, the synthesis and modelling of data from published literature are commonly used to generate insights and test theories across systems. However, the tasks of searching, screening, and extracting data from literature are often arduous. Researchers may manually process hundreds to thousands of articles for systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and compiling synthetic datasets. As relevant articles expand to tens or hundreds of thousands, computer-based approaches can increase the efficiency, transparency and reproducibility of literature-based research. Methods available for text mining are rapidly changing owing to developments in machine learning-based language models. We review the growing landscape of approaches, mapping them onto three broad paradigms (frequency-based approaches, traditional Natural Language Processing and deep learning-based language models). This serves as an entry point to learn foundational and cutting-edge concepts, vocabularies, and methods to foster integration of these tools into ecological and evolutionary research. We cover approaches for modelling ecological texts, generating training data, developing custom models and interacting with large language models and discuss challenges and possible solutions to implementing these methods in ecology and evolution.

Topics: Data Mining; Ecology; Biological Evolution; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning

PubMed: 39082244
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0423

Review

Authors: Roel van Klink, Tom August, Yves Bas...

Insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth, but their small size and high diversity have always made them challenging to study. Recent technological advances have the potential to revolutionise insect ecology and monitoring. We describe the state of the art of four technologies (computer vision, acoustic monitoring, radar, and molecular methods), and assess their advantages, current limitations, and future potential. We discuss how these technologies can adhere to modern standards of data curation and transparency, their implications for citizen science, and their potential for integration among different monitoring programmes and technologies. We argue that they provide unprecedented possibilities for insect ecology and monitoring, but it will be important to foster international standards via collaboration.

Topics: Animals; Ecology; Insecta

PubMed: 35811172
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2022.06.001

Authors:

is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.

Topics: Ecology

PubMed: 36443298
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32900-1

Review

Authors: Federico Riva, Caio Graco-Roza, Gergana N Daskalova...

Ecological systems are quintessentially complex systems. Understanding and being able to predict phenomena typical of complex systems is, therefore, critical to progress in ecology and conservation amidst escalating global environmental change. However, myriad definitions of complexity and excessive reliance on conventional scientific approaches hamper conceptual advances and synthesis. Ecological complexity may be better understood by following the solid theoretical basis of complex system science (CSS). We review features of ecological systems described within CSS and conduct bibliometric and text mining analyses to characterize articles that refer to ecological complexity. Our analyses demonstrate that the study of complexity in ecology is a highly heterogeneous, global endeavor that is only weakly related to CSS. Current research trends are typically organized around basic theory, scaling, and macroecology. We leverage our review and the generalities identified in our analyses to suggest a more coherent and cohesive way forward in the study of complexity in ecology.

Topics: Ecology; Ecosystem; Data Mining; Bibliometrics; Animals; Human Activities

PubMed: 37343095
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq4207

Authors: Theodore J Morgan, Michael A Herman, Loretta C Johnson...

Topics: Animals; Ecology; Environment; Gene-Environment Interaction; Genome; Genomics; Genotype; Phenotype

PubMed: 29608122
DOI: 10.1139/gen-2018-0022