International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources

About: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is a nonprofit organization based out in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Biodiversity & Population. The organization has 1317 authors who have published 1870 publications receiving 97588 citations.

Bird and bat species' global vulnerability to collision mortality at wind farms revealed through a trait-based assessment

Abstract: Mitigation of anthropogenic climate change involves deployments of renewable energy worldwide, including wind farms, which can pose a significant collision risk to volant animals. Most studies into the collision risk between species and wind turbines, however, have taken place in industrialized countries. Potential effects for many locations and species therefore remain unclear. To redress this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review of recorded collisions between birds and bats and wind turbines within developed countries. We related collision rate to species-level traits and turbine characteristics to quantify the potential vulnerability of 9538 bird and 888 bat species globally. Avian collision rate was affected by migratory strategy, dispersal distance and habitat associations, and bat collision rates were influenced by dispersal distance. For birds and bats, larger turbine capacity (megawatts) increased collision rates; however, deploying a smaller number of large turbines with greater energy output reduced total collision risk per unit energy output, although bat mortality increased again with the largest turbines. Areas with high concentrations of vulnerable species were also identified, including migration corridors. Our results can therefore guide wind farm design and location to reduce the risk of large-scale animal mortality. This is the first quantitative global assessment of the relative collision vulnerability of species groups with wind turbines, providing valuable guidance for minimizing potentially serious negative impacts on biodiversity.

Conserving forest biodiversity in times of violent conflict

Abstract: Forests are often frontiers, and like all frontiers, they are sites of dynamic social, ecological, political and economic changes. Such dynamism involves constantly changing advantages and disadvantages to different groups of people, which not surprisingly can lead to armed conflict, and all too frequently to war. Many governments have contributed to conflict, however inadvertently, by nationalizing their forests, so that traditional forest inhabitants have been disenfranchised while national governments sell the rights to trees in order to earn foreign exchange. Biodiversity-rich tropical forests in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Indochina, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Central and West Africa, the Amazon, Colombia, Central America and New Caledonia have all been the sites of armed conflict in recent years, sometimes involving international forces. Forests have sometimes been part of the cause of conflict (as in Myanmar and Sierra Leone) but more often victims of it. Violent conflicts in temperate areas also typically involve forests as shelters for both civilians and combatants, as in the Balkans. While these conflicts have frequently, even invariably, caused negative impacts on biodiversity, peace can be even worse, as it enables forest exploitation to operate with impunity. Because many of the remaining forests are along international borders, international cooperation is required for their conservation. As one response, the concept of international “Peace Parks” is being promoted in many parts of the world as a way of linking biodiversity conservation with national security. The Convention on Biological Diversity, which entered into force at the end of 1993 and now has 187 State Parties, offers a useful framework for such cooperation.

Parasites and the Evolutionary Diversification of Primate Clades

Abstract: Coevolutionary interactions such as those between hosts and parasites have been regarded as an underlying cause of evolutionary diversification, but evidence from natural populations is limited. Among primates and other mammalian groups, measures of host diversification rates vary widely among lineages, but comparative studies have not yet identified a reliable explanation for this variation. In this study, we used a comprehensive data set of disease-causing organisms from free-living primates to illustrate how phylogenetic comparative methods can be used to examine mammalian lineage diversity in relation to parasite species richness. Our results provide evidence that the phylogenetic diversity of primate clades is correlated positively with the number of parasite species harbored by each host and that this pattern is largely independent of other host traits that have been shown to influence diversification rates and parasite species richness in primates. We investigated two possible mechanisms that could explain this association, namely that parasites themselves drive host evolutionary diversification through processes linked with sexual selection and that host shifts or host sharing increases parasite species richness among diverse primate clades. Neither parasite species richness nor host diversification is related to measures of sexual selection in primates. Further, we found only partial evidence that more rapidly diversifying host lineages produced increased opportunities for host sharing or host shifting by parasites through mechanisms involving species' geographic range overlap. Thus, our analyses provide evidence for an important link between the evolutionary diversification of primates and the richness of their parasite communities, but other mechanisms, particularly those related to reciprocal selection or coextinction of hosts and parasites, require further investigation.