Selected publications

The authors investigated the effectiveness of Protected Areas (PAs) in conserving amphibians and reptiles under climate change. They found that PAs are effective in providing refuge to these species, but spatial conservation gaps still exist and many species may go extinct due to climate change.

The authors mapped and analyzed the literature on the hypothesis of urban biotic homogenization. They identified 225 studies addressing the hypothesis. Half of them investigated homogenization across cities, the other half investigating homogenization within cities. There are strong research biases and thus knowledge gaps in the literature and about 55% of the studies supported the hypothesis.

In both time and space, the observed differentiation in trait values among populations and communities can be the result of interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes. The authors extended methods to quantify ecological and evolutionary contributions to trait changes to account for empirical studies that document trait differentiation among populations structured in space.

Scientists integrated data about natural chemical compounds and the organisms they have been documented in, provided literature references and exposed the information both as a stand-alone database and via Wikidata.The database enables queries that relate natural chemical compounds to the taxa they have been found in and the literature documenting the evidence.

The authors developed indices to quantify the urban affinity of species by using publicly available occurrence data and examined the performance of these indices using a global dataset of bats. The results show that simple indices are appropriate and most practical for producing quantitative assessments of species’ urban affinity.

The authors analysed several hundred proteins of a broad diversity of fungal species in order to untangle the early diversification of fungi. Thorough curation of the phylogenomic data set and usage of cutting-edge methods enabled them to resolve long-standing contested relationships among different phyla.

The IUCN Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) is a global standard to assess negative impacts of alien species on native biodiversity. This paper presents EICAT+, a complementary framework using 5 semiquantitative scenarios to classify the magnitude of positive impacts that alien species have on biodiversity.

It is widely debated if species distribution models are transferable across space and time. The authors synthesized results on 217 species from 50 studies to elucidate effects of niche change on model transferability. They found that niche change reduced model transferability; however, a lack of presence points for developing models led to an even stronger reduction in transferability.