Growing concern about biodiversity loss underscores the need to quantify and understand temporal change. Here, we review the opportunities presented by biodiversity time series, and address three related issues: (i) recognizing the characteristics of temporal data; (ii) selecting appropriate statistical procedures for analysing temporal data; and (iii) inferring and forecasting biodiversity cha...

Environmental insecurity is a source and outcome of biodiversity declines and social conflict. One challenge to scaling insecurity reduction policies is that empirical evidence about local attitudes is overwhelmingly missing. We set three objectives: determine how local people rank risk associated with different sources of environmental insecurity; assess perceptions of environmental insecurity...

The ability to address land degradation and biodiversity loss while maintaining the production of plant and animal products is a key global challenge. Biodiversity decline as a result of vegetation clearance, cultivation, grazing, pesticide and herbicide application, and plantation establishment, amongst other factors, has been widely documented in agricultural ecosystems. In this paper we iden...

Biodiversity declined markedly over the past 150 years, with the biodiversity loss in fluvial ecosystems exceeding the global average. River restoration now aims at flood safety while enhancing biodiversity and has had success locally. However, at the scale of large river distributaries, the recovery remained elusive. We quantify changes in biodiversity of protected and endangered species over ...

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, BHL,1 is an established and successful digital library, formed by a global consortium of natural history libraries, with engaged and enthusiastic users. The extensive partnerships, curated content, innovative tools and services, the ease of mining the data all combine to establish an open science resource that advances scientific progress through linking, use ...

Biodiversity continues to decline, despite the implementation of international conservation conventions and measures. To counteract biodiversity loss, it is pivotal to know how conservation actions affect biodiversity trends. Focussing on European farmland species, we review what is known about the impact of conservation initiatives on biodiversity. We argue that the effects of conservation are...

The importance of biodiversity for the integrated functioning of ecosystems remains unclear because most evidence comes from analyses of biodiversity's effect on individual functions. Here we show that the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function become more important as more functions are considered. We present the first systematic investigation of biodiversity's effect on ecosystem multi...

Recent advances in molecular technology have revolutionized research on all aspects of the biology of organisms, including ciliates, and created unprecedented opportunities for pursuing a more integrative approach to investigations of biodiversity. However, this goal is complicated by large gaps and inconsistencies that still exist in the foundation of basic information about biodiversity of ci...

present survey synthesized information on fish biodiversity in the perennial freshwater body of ramnagar, east midnapore district of west bengal, india. we documented 45 fish species under 29 genera, 18 families and 8 orders during the periods from1990 to 1995, whereas, 34 species from 21 genera and 12 families under 7 orders were recorded presently from freshwater body of different perennial p...

the aim of this study is comparison of soil characteristics and biodiversity in plantation of bald cypress and caucasian alder forest stands in kludeh region (mazandaran province). in order to study biodiversity in forest stands and control region, 10 sample plots (releve) were selected and the name and abundance of plant species of the forest floor were recorded. biodiversity of herbal plants ...