Michelle L K Harrison

TL;DR: A terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage is analysed to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes and shows that in the worst-affected habitats, pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%.

TL;DR: This is the first worldwide synthetic analysis of how individual species in four major taxonomic groups—invertebrates, ‘herptiles’ (reptiles and amphibians), mammals and birds—respond to multiple human pressures in tropical and sub-tropical forests.

TL;DR: A new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world is described and assessed.

TL;DR: The PREDICTS project as discussed by the authors provides a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors search for studies conducted in the tropics and published in the last 10 years to understand how different aspects of landscape change affect functional diversity metrics and how the latter are associated to ecosystem functioning.