Animal Science Papers and Reports

Current conceptions of “urban biodiversity” address only particular taxa, ignoring the full richness of species within cities. Despite their exclusion from these conceptions, tree‐dwelling lichens, mosses, and liverworts (collectively, “epiphytes”) are recognized as bioindicators of urbanization, but their inherent contributions to biodiversity are largely unrecognized. Here, we report on a survey of epiphytes in the city of Vancouver, Canada. Using Bayesian multilevel models, we asked the following questions: how diverse are epiphytes in this large temperate city, and what urban and host‐tree factors determine their distribution? We found 39 macrolichen, 32 moss, and seven liverwort species on Vancouver street trees, establishing them as rich microenvironments influenced by a network of interacting factors previously unaccounted for. Our results challenge the idea that pollution and urban heat islands primarily regulate urban epiphyte diversity; instead, we identify host‐tree genus as having strong effects on all epiphytes. Expanding urban biodiversity to include epiphyte diversity recharacterizes urban landscapes as rewilded spaces of interdependent coexistence.

All cities are home to birds, which, through their activities, can either enhance or detract from human well‐being. To identify such interactions, we synthesize current understanding of bird‐mediated ecosystem services and disservices in cities. We find widespread evidence that birds provide cultural services, but the link between urban bird diversity and these benefits is surprisingly tenuous. Birds also have potential to provide regulating services; however, rather than being measured, these services are usually assumed from non‐urban research, and may be overestimated (eg pollination, seed dispersal) or undervalued (decomposition, nutrient cycling). People's perceptions of birds are not uniform, and services are not always delivered equitably among residents. We call for moving beyond using species richness and traits as proxies, and instead explicitly measuring services and disservices across the heterogeneous urban landscape. Such information is critical to designing cities that sustain biodiversity and result in net positive, and equitable, benefits to people.

We document the importance of low‐light conditions in 136 animal species and then translate the new world atlas of skyglow, which reports artificial night sky brightness, into estimates of anthropogenic illuminance (that is, artificial light reaching Earth's surface). Quantifying habitat illuminance from skyglow facilitates understanding of the disruption of natural light cycles, such as new moon conditions, which are critical to animal ecology. We corroborated this transformation of sky brightness by comparing concurrent field measurements of skyglow and illuminance. We then quantified global artificial illuminance caused by skyglow, finding that skyglow artificially doubled illuminance of new moon conditions—a critical phase for biological processes, such as foraging, courtship, and mating—for 22.9% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, 51.0% of Key Biodiversity Areas, 77.1% of Global Protected Areas, and ~20% of highly diverse areas for mammals, birds, and amphibians. We provide summaries of artificial illuminance at 750‐m pixel resolution for each protected area to aid land managers and guide policy in reducing skyglow in areas that may yield the greatest benefits for conserving animal biodiversity.

Scientists have long categorized the planet's climate using the Köppen‐Geiger (KG) classification to research climate‐change impacts, biogeographical realms, agricultural suitability, and conservation. However, global KG maps primarily rely on macroclimate data collected by weather stations, which may not represent microclimatic conditions experienced by most life on Earth. Few studies have explored microclimate at broad scales, largely due to data and computational constraints. Here, we predicted KG classes separately from macroclimate and microclimate for more than 32 million locations across six continents. As compared to macroclimate, microclimate had 14‐fold lower error and reclassified 38% of the total area. Microclimate‐derived KG classes were not only more spatially variable but also encompassed a broader range of latitudes, relative to macroclimate‐derived KG classes. By redrawing the lines of climate classes, our study prompts a reevaluation of the importance of meteorological drivers of ecology across scales, shedding light on how natural, agricultural, and social systems experience and respond to global change.

One Health initiatives have advanced zoonotic disease management by recognizing the interconnectedness of three sectors of governance (human, ecosystem, and animal) and by identifying options that can improve full‐system health. Although One Health has had many successes, its full realization may be inhibited by a lack of strategies to overcome simultaneous impediments in decision making and governance. Decision impediments that hinder management may include uncertainty, risk, resource limitations, and trade‐offs among objectives. Governance impediments arise from disparities in costs and benefits of disease management among sectors. Tools and strategies developed from decision science, collaboration, and negotiation theory can help articulate and overcome coinciding decision and governance impediments and enhance multisectoral One Health initiatives. In cases where collaboration and negotiation are insufficient to address disparities in cross‐sector costs and benefits, altering incentive structures might improve disease‐specific outcomes and improve the realization of One Health.

Globalization is increasing the threat of invasive forest insects to ecosystems. Control efforts against the same pest species progressively occur across distant jurisdictions as integrated pest management (IPM) programs or tactics developed in one region are adopted by another region. This knowledge exchange accelerates responses and collaboration; however, transplanted IPM programs can overlook preexisting or emerging differences between regions, which may explain their varying success. These differences include biological variation in the pest system, environmental conditions, issues of scale and capacity of the response, regulatory environment, and cultural context. We examine the role of these factors in the adoption and outcomes of IPM programs, drawing from case studies and an online survey of forestry IPM experts. To facilitate regional adaptation of IPM programs during their adoption and implementation in new regions, we propose an evaluation framework and recommend approaches to not only reduce risks but also maximize uptake, efficacy, and resilience.

In a changing world, predicting ecosystem functions is essential to ensuring human well‐being and survival. However, commonly used trait‐based predictive approaches frequently lack predictive power. Statistical and conceptual attempts to better incorporate environmental factors into trait‐based predictions have done so by integrating indirect, trait‐mediated effects therein. Here, we define ecosystem functions as changes in the state, position, or nature of energy or matter within an ecosystem, and then illustrate how environmental factors can directly affect ecosystem functions. Given that the effects of organismal traits and environmental factors are not necessarily additive, we also propose that interactions between organismal traits and environmental factors (hereafter, trait–environment interactions) have explanatory power. We propose a conceptual framework in which organismal traits, environmental factors, and trait–environment interactions, together with the environment's effects on traits (plasticity) and traits’ effects on the environment (ecosystem engineering), can explain ecosystem functions. We conclude by discussing the importance of considering trait–environment interactions and identifying future avenues of exploration.

The legal trade in exotic pets is linked to the establishment of nonnative species and climate change compounds the risk of invasion, overwhelming management efforts. We characterized the world's largest market for exotic pets—the US—by providing a real‐time snapshot of species with invasion potential, and assessed the current and future risk posed to native systems. We found a diverse marketplace of 1178 terrestrial vertebrates, predominantly tropical species. Using 2818 brick‐and‐mortar pet stores, we developed spatial models of propagule risk, from which it was determined that future climate change may increase climate suitability by 194%, which in turn equates to 83% of total land area in the contiguous US becoming suitable for invasion by 2080. Rapid growth in the exotic pet trade industry is expected to exacerbate current findings, especially at southernmost latitudes. The real‐time nature of this study provides more actionable management information than outdated import data.

The nexus between changing habitats, faunal communities, and anthropogenic stressors represents an enduring conservation challenge. We propose that habitat‐mediated soundscape conservation—the ability of biogenic habitats to attenuate anthropogenic noise—plays an unrecognized role in mitigating underwater noise pollution, a pervasive disturbance that disrupts the ability of species to perceive acoustic cues and communicate. We hypothesize that noise attenuation depends on the composition and physical complexity of biogenic habitats, and severe habitat degradation can cause acoustic conditions to exceed ecological tipping points, resulting in the emergence of alternative acoustic states. We examine this concept in coral reefs and kelp forests, given that the global decline of both ecosystems provides the requisite conditions to investigate our hypothesis. We then explore why anthropogenic structures fail to provide acoustic refugia. Finally, we assess whether habitat restoration or acoustic enrichment can reestablish natural soundscapes. Our review underscores the importance of considering habitat degradation when evaluating the risk that pollutants pose to ecosystems.

Temperate forests are the most fragmented forest biome, yet current understanding of fragmentation effects on ecosystem processes, such as carbon (C) cycling, is rooted in tropical forest research. We review the effects of persistent fragmentation on temperate forest ecosystem processes and quantify the extent to which the US national forest inventory and land‐cover maps represent forest edge area. We found systematic underrepresentation of forest edges across all methods. As compared with very high resolution (1 m) maps, conventional 30‐m resolution forest cover maps underestimated forest edge area by 16.4%, on average. Accounting for all forest edge area and edge effects on forest structure and growth resulted in a 14.8% median increase in aboveground forest C estimates, with 23.8% and 74.2% increases in agriculturally and urban dominated counties, respectively. We conclude by proposing improvements to forest inventories, maps, and models to better represent the fragmented temperate forest landscape.