The impact of climate change is considered to be particularly important in arid environments where ectotherm species constitute the majority of vertebrates. Surprisingly, most studies dealing with the response of reptiles to climate change focus only on a few species. Here, we used a 30‐yr monitoring dataset to assess the consequences of climatic variations on a desert reptile community in eastern Australia. Community structure was measured in three habitat plots differing in flood regime using a range of metrics: the number of individuals and species, alpha biodiversity indices, species turnover, functional diversity, and an indicator describing the change in the critical maximum temperature of the community. Although the functional groups of species sharing similar traits were not clustered by habitat plots, diversity indices were highly plot‐specific. Community composition significantly shifted over time toward higher abundance of individuals for species tolerant to heat in two plots, whereas we found an opposite trend in the third plot. Importantly, the response patterns of the different diversity indices to climatic parameters were not uniform. Yet, water‐related parameters were overall more influential than temperature. A decrease in water availability paired with rising temperatures may have strongly negative impacts. We stress that combining different diversity metrics is critical to better grasp the complexity of community responses to climate change and that predicting future changes in reptile communities of deserts needs to account for the complementarity of different sources of water supply such as those resulting from the dynamics of local rainfalls with flood regime.
Although cinema narrative represents a fundamental communication tool in framing public opinion, whether a negative representation of certain species in the context of animal‐horror movies might increase the attitudinal hostilities towards them remains an aspect of wildlife perception that is poorly studied.
Here, we reviewed online sources from the last 70 years to describe the negative representation of animal roles in horror and disaster movies. Specifically, we described species diversity, how the animal was depicted, the cause for its aggressive behaviour and how it came in contact with the human characters. By means of principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), we also highlighted three main typologies of animal‐horror movies.
The dataset consisted of 263 titles produced world‐wide from 1950 to 2019. The results showed that animal representation is transversal yet uneven, with five species groups out of 18 appearing in more than half of the movies. There were significant associations between species, their representation and the different kinds of movies they appeared in, with some species groups appearing more commonly in certain types of film plots rather than others.
Together, the results suggested that both the themes and topics of animal‐horror movies were often the result of a combination of factors, including fashion‐driven audience interests, societal and political concerns, and technological availability at the time of production. Whether this repeated and variegated representation can increase attitudinal hostility remains however unclear.
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Amphibian species are declining worldwide, with a negative trend affecting both rare and widespread species. There is increasing evidence that resources must be allocated not only toward the monitoring of rare and charismatic species; however, the attention toward abundant species has often been minimal. Here, we describe the strong reduction in the numbers of several widespread amphibian species over the last 3 years observed in three independent amphibian monitoring studies conducted in an alpine, floodplain, and urban landscape in Italy, Germany, and Russia, respectively. The decline was particularly strong in juveniles, but adults and egg clutches were also affected. Such declining rates, if prolonged in the future years, will likely pose a serious threat to the populations' ability to recover and might increase extinction risk also in abundant and widespread species.
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