Parallel to this shift in forest cover, the species found within forests are changing rapidly over time. The species that make up forest communities fluctuates naturally as forests recover over time, as well as with to human activities (eg. when species are introduced to new areas, when a species is driven to local extinction or when populations move to avoid disturbances or changes in climate).
By Haley Arnold Every year vast areas of land are deforested. At the same time, some previously deforested areas regrow - either as naturally regenerating “secondary forests” or as plantations [1,2]. Long-standing patterns of forest losses and gains have led to an increase in secondary and plantation forests relative to old “primary” forests which have been undisturbed for centuries.
Parallel to this shift in forest cover, the species found within forests are changing rapidly over time. The species that make up forest communities fluctuates naturally as forests recover over time, as well as with to human activities (eg. when species are introduced to new areas, when a species is driven to local extinction or when populations move to avoid disturbances or changes in climate).
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This week we published a paper based on 5 years of intensive sampling of Trinidad's rivers as part of the BioTIME project. The aim of this research was to understand more about how communities change over time, so that we are better able to detect and manage impacts to biodiversity.
We found that while the number of species in a community tends to remain stable over time, changes in the composition of species are more common. We also found that assemblages of diatoms (single-celled plants), invertebrates (e.g. insect larvae) and fish at the same sites each show different patterns over time. This suggests that tracking species identities as well as species richness is important, and that we cannot necessarily rely on monitoring one taxa to learn about an ecosystem as a whole. Last week I was interviewed by local journalist Shereen Ali about our work on recreational disturbance of T&T's rivers. I think she did a great job at getting the central messages of the research across and raising awareness of the potential impact we can have on aquatic biodiversity (see bottom of post for downloadable pdf of article).
This week Professor Anne Magurran attended the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) in Copenhagen, accompanied by a film that was produced by Steve Smart of the School of Biology to explain what the BioTIME project is all about. The video features some great presenting skills from Dr Iain Matthews, and some rather shaky amateur camera work from me! I think it gives a nice impression of what my fieldwork in Trinidad's Northern Range is really like, and what the project is all about... The BioTIME fieldwork team were asked to feature in promotional film for The University of the West Indies, Faculty of Science and Technology. We were happy to oblige and spent an hour or so in the rain re-enacting collecting a data logger several times over. The results can be seen below (we feature in the first minute of the video). |
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