Background: Many forests within the southern Appalachian region, USA, have experienced decades of fire exclusion, contributing to regeneration challenges for species such as oaks (Quercus spp. L.) and pines (Pinus spp. L.), and threatening the maintenance of oak-dominated forests in the future. While the use of prescribed fire as a forest management tool is increasing within this region, there remains a lack of information on the potential role of wildfire. A wildfire within the Daniel Boone National Forest, Kentucky, USA, provided an opportunity to investigate how wildfire affected forest vegetation response. Results: We examined the effects of fire severity, quantified using composite burn index (CBI), on basal area, stem density, and sapling recruitment for several key species. We also examined the effects of fire severity on understory species richness and illuminated the consequence of non-native species invasions following fire. Our results demonstrated a negative relationship between fire severity and basal area (stems ≥2 cm diameter at breast height; P ≤ 0.001), and a positive relationship with the recruitment of oak and pine saplings (both P ≤ 0.001), oak sapling density (P = 0.012), and non-woody understory species richness (P ≤ 0.001). We also found that increasing fire severity heightened likelihood of invasion by non-native species, specifically princess tree (Paulownia tomentosa [Thunb.] Siebold & Zucc. ex. Steud; P = 0.009) and Chinese silvergrass (Miscanthus sinensis Andersson; P = 0.028). Conclusions: Where it is feasible, public land managers may be able to generate a range of fire severity during future prescribed fires that approximate some characters of wildfire. These fires, when implemented in southern Appalachian upland forests, may help recruit oaks and pines and boost their potential as future canopy dominants. However, the increased occurrence of non-native invasive species invasion following fire conveys the importance of targeted and timely eradication treatments before new populations of non-native species may become established or reproduce, contradicting the ecological benefits of fire.
w reviewer homophily. These analyses leverage data from 31 studies, which cumulatively examined 312,740 manuscripts submitted to >640 journals-including Nature Portfolio journals, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our dataset represents 4,529,971 author position/demographic/review stage interactions, which upon publication will be the largest publicly available dataset of this kind for future work to build upon. Finally, we describe the current landscape of peer review in the subfields of ecology and evolution by collecting peer review policy data from the websites of 541 journals. Altogether, we find that author demographics predict review outcomes; clear, evidence-based solutions to alleviate review bias are lacking; and relatively few journals are pro-actively combatting bias. Results and discussion Disparate peer review outcomes by author demographicsWe found evidence for disparate peer review outcomes for all demographics that we examined at one or more stages in the review process (Supplementary Tables 3-40). We found the most data on outcomes by author assumed gender (Supplementary Data 1). Assumed female authors had worse or similar outcomes compared with assumed male authors, depending on the author position and review stage (Fig. 2).We found notably lower success throughout the review process for authors with institutional affiliations in Asia, in countries where English is not a primary language and in countries with lower Human Development Indices (HDI; Figs. 2 and 3). Compared with authors with affiliations located in Europe, North America and Oceania, authors with affiliations located in Asia had the most consistent disparities, but authors in Latin America and Africa also often had worse review outcomes. When considering a country's continent, language and HDI
1. The occurrence and distributions of wildlife populations and communities are shifting as a result of global changes. To evaluate whether these shifts are negatively impacting biodiversity processes, it is critical to monitor the status, trends and effects of environmental variables on entire communities. However, modelling the dynamics of multiple species simultaneously can require large amounts of diverse data, and few modelling approaches exist to simultaneously provide species and community-level inferences.2. We present an 'integrated community occupancy model' (ICOM) that unites principles of data integration and hierarchical community modelling in a single framework to provide inferences on species-specific and community occurrence dynamics using multiple data sources. The ICOM combines replicated and nonreplicated detectionnondetection data sources using a hierarchical framework that explicitly accounts for different detection and sampling processes across data sources. We use simulations to compare the ICOM to previously developed hierarchical community occupancy models and single species integrated distribution models. We then apply our model to assess the occurrence and biodiversity dynamics of foliage-gleaning birds in the White Mountain National Forest in the northeastern USA from 2010 to 2018 using three independent data sources.3. Simulations reveal that integrating multiple data sources in the ICOM increased precision and accuracy of species and community-level inferences compared to single data source models, although benefits of integration were dependent on the information content of individual data sources (e.g. amount of replication). Compared to single species models, the ICOM yielded more precise species-level estimates. Within our case study, the ICOM had the highest out-of-sample predictive performance compared to single species models and models that used only a subset of the three data sources.4. The ICOM provides more precise estimates of occurrence dynamics compared to multi-species models using single data sources or integrated single-species models.We further found that the ICOM had improved predictive performance across a broad region of interest with an empirical case study of forest birds. The ICOM offers an
Tropical forests in the Americas are undergoing rapid conversion to commercial agriculture, and many migratory bird species that use these forests have experienced corresponding populations declines. Conservation research for migratory birds in the tropics has focused overwhelmingly on shade coffee plantations and adjacent forest, but both cover types are now in decline, creating an urgent need to evaluate conservation opportunities in other agricultural systems. Here we compare how a community of 42 Neotropical migratory bird species and a subset of five conservation-priority species differ in usage and habitat associations among a secondary forest baseline and four expanding commercial plantation systems in Guatemala: African oil palm, teak, rubber, and mixed-native hardwoods. We found that mixed-native hardwood plantations supported the highest richness and diversity of all migrants and that the three hardwood plantation types generally outperformed oil palm in richness and diversity metrics. Despite this, oil palm supported high abundance of several common and widespread species also experiencing range-wide population declines and may therefore play an important role in conserving common species. Mature secondary forest hosted low abundance and diversity of the full migratory community, but high abundance and richness of conservation priority migrants along with native hardwood and teak plantations. Likewise, the percentage of forest cover on the landscape was positively associated with priority migrant abundance and richness but negatively associated with the abundance of migrants in general, highlighting how individual species within the broad group of Neotropical migratory landbirds respond differently to anthropogenic changes in land use. Across all cover types, the retention of tall overstory trees increased the abundance, richness, and diversity of all migrants, which indicates that vertical structural diversity and remnant trees are important habitat features for birds in agricultural landscapes. Our findings show that conservation opportunities exist in hardwood and oil palm plantations, though the species likely to benefit from conservation action will vary among plantation types. For the subset of conservation priority migrants, our results suggest that conservation efforts should combine strategies that retain and restore secondary forest, promote the adoption of native hardwood and teak plantations, and promote the retention of tall, remnant trees in agricultural landscapes.
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