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1. Designing agricultural landscapes for arthropod-based ecosystem services in North America

   https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2021.01.003  

   Haan, Nathan L.; Iuliano, Benjamin G.; Gratton, Claudio; Landis, Douglas A. (March 2021, Advances in ecological research)

   null (Ed.)

   Agricultural landscapes in North America have developed through complex interactions of biophysical, socioeconomic and technological forces. While they can be highly productive, these landscapes are increasingly simplified, causing biodiversity loss. As a result, ecosystem services associated with biodiversity are being dismantled. Agricultural landscape structure arises from collective decisions of farmers over long time periods, which are usually not intentionally coordinated beyond the farm scale. Regaining ecosystem services will require active efforts to intentionally redesign landscapes, in part based on ecological evidence about relationships between landscape structure and ecosystem services. Here we focus on services provided by arthropods and how to foster them at landscape scales. We first provide a brief history of how agricultural landscape structure in temperate North America developed and review the landscape-scale ecological drivers underpinning arthropod-based ecosystem services. We then propose ecological and social principles for designing agricultural landscapes, based on the ecological evidence we reviewed and on previous efforts in agricultural landscape design. Finally, we look ahead to discern prospects for putting agricultural landscape design into practice, including ecological, technological and policy opportunities. To reap benefits from arthropod-based services, future agricultural landscapes will need to increase in structural heterogeneity and diversity across multiple dimensions including crop, farmer and consumer diversity. A number of knowledge gaps persist, including how to design landscapes at spatial scales that are relevant to service providers, identifying areas of overlap or conflict between design for ecosystem services and for biodiversity conservation more broadly and navigating the social and political processes needed to implement landscape design. 

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2. Landscape-level human disturbance results in loss and contraction of mammalian populations in tropical forests

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002976  

   Greco, Ilaria; Beaudrot, Lydia; Sutherland, Chris; Tenan, Simone; Hsieh, Chia; Gorczynski, Daniel; Sheil, Douglas; Brodie, Jedediah; Firoz_Ahmed, Mohammad; Ahumada, Jorge; et al (February 2025, PLOS Biology)

   Loreau, Michel (Ed.)

   Tropical forests hold most of Earth’s biodiversity and a higher concentration of threatened mammals than other biomes. As a result, some mammal species persist almost exclusively in protected areas, often within extensively transformed and heavily populated landscapes. Other species depend on remaining remote forested areas with sparse human populations. However, it remains unclear how mammalian communities in tropical forests respond to anthropogenic pressures in the broader landscape in which they are embedded. As governments commit to increasing the extent of global protected areas to prevent further biodiversity loss, identifying the landscape-level conditions supporting wildlife has become essential. Here, we assessed the relationship between mammal communities and anthropogenic threats in the broader landscape. We simultaneously modeled species richness and community occupancy as complementary metrics of community structure, using a state-of-the-art community model parameterized with a standardized pan-tropical data set of 239 mammal species from 37 forests across 3 continents. Forest loss and fragmentation within a 50-km buffer were associated with reduced occupancy in monitored communities, while species richness was unaffected by them. In contrast, landscape-scale human density was associated with reduced mammal richness but not occupancy, suggesting that sensitive species have been extirpated, while remaining taxa are relatively unaffected. Taken together, these results provide evidence of extinction filtering within tropical forests triggered by anthropogenic pressure occurring in the broader landscape. Therefore, existing and new reserves may not achieve the desired biodiversity outcomes without concurrent investment in addressing landscape-scale threats. 

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3. Direct effects of mountain uplift and topography on biodiversity

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp7290  

   Marder, Eyal; Smiley, Tara M; Yanites, Brian J; Kravitz, Katherine (March 2025, Science)

   Biodiversity hotspots in Earth’s mountain ranges suggest a strong connection between topographic development and biological processes. However, it remains unclear whether high biodiversity in mountain ranges is an evolutionary response to the rate of relief generation during mountain building. Focusing on small mammals, such as rodents, we used coupled landscape-biological simulations to show that biodiversity increases with the magnitude and rate of tectonic uplift. This relationship, visible in depositional lowlands over millions of years, underscores the considerable role of mountain building in shaping past and present terrestrial biodiversity. Our results provide insights into the influence of topographic changes on evolutionary processes, offering a potential link between mountain formation and paleodiversity records. 

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4. Plant biomes demonstrate that landscape resilience today is the lowest it has been since end‐Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions

   https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15299  

   Wang, Yue; Shipley, Benjamin R.; Lauer, Daniel A.; Pineau, Rozenn M.; McGuire, Jenny L. (August 2020, Global Change Biology)

   Abstract Resilient landscapes have helped maintain terrestrial biodiversity during periods of climatic and environmental change. Identifying the tempo and mode of landscape transitions and the drivers of landscape resilience is critical to maintaining natural systems and preserving biodiversity given today's rapid climate and land use changes. However, resilient landscapes are difficult to recognize on short time scales, as perturbations are challenging to quantify and ecosystem transitions are rare. Here we analyze two components of North American landscape resilience over 20,000 years: residence time and recovery time. To evaluate landscape dynamics, we use plant biomes, preserved in the fossil pollen record, to examine how long a biome type persists at a given site (residence time) and how long it takes for the biome at that site to reestablish following a transition (recovery time). Biomes have a median residence time of only 230–460 years. Only 64% of biomes recover their original biome type, but recovery time is 140–290 years. Temperatures changing faster than 0.5°C per 500 years result in much reduced residence times. Following a transition, biodiverse biomes reestablish more quickly. Landscape resilience varies through time. Notably, short residence times and long recovery times directly preceded the end‐Pleistocene megafauna extinction, resulting in regional destabilization, and combining with more proximal human impacts to deliver a one‐two punch to megafauna species. Our work indicates that landscapes today are once again exhibiting low resilience, foreboding potential extinctions to come. Conservation strategies focused on improving both landscape and ecosystem resilience by increasing local connectivity and targeting regions with high richness and diverse landforms can mitigate these extinction risks. 

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5. From island biogeography to landscape and metacommunity ecology: A macroecological perspective of bat communities

   https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14785  

   Presley, Steven J.; Willig, Michael R. (May 2022, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)

   Abstract The equilibrium theory of island biogeography and its quantitative consideration of origination and extinction dynamics as they relate to island area and distance from source populations have evolved over time and enriched theory related to many disciplines in spatial ecology. Indeed, the island focus was catalytic to the emergence of landscape ecology and macroecology in the late 20th century. We integrate concepts and perspectives of island biogeography, landscape ecology, macroecology, and metacommunity ecology, and show how these disciplines have advanced the understanding of variation in abundance, biodiversity, and composition of bat communities. We leverage the well‐studied bat fauna of the islands in the Caribbean to illustrate the complex interplay of ecological, biogeographical, and evolutionary processes in molding local biodiversity and system‐wide structure. Thereafter, we highlight the role of habitat loss and fragmentation, which is increasing at an accelerating rate during the Anthropocene, on the structure of local bat communities and regional metacommunities across landscapes. Bat species richness increases with the amount of available habitat, often forming nested subsets along gradients of patch or island area. Similarly, the distance to and identity of sources of colonization influence the richness, composition, and metacommunity structure of islands and landscape networks. 

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