Biology subjects

Neuschulz, E. L.

Publications and source records attributed to Neuschulz, E. L..

8 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Acoustic indices predict recovery of tropical bird communities for taxonomic and functional composition

Quantifying the success of biodiversity restoration is a major challenge in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. We evaluated the potential of acoustic indices to predict the recovery success of bird communities within abandoned agricultural areas. Using audio recordings from a lowland tropical forest region, we identified 334 bird species and calculated established acoustic indices. Community composition was analyzed using Hill numbers, accounting for incomplete sampling. Acoustic indices effectively predicted independent species data (R2 = 0.59-0.76), capturing not only taxonomic but also functional and phylogenetic composition. Taxonomic composition was best predicted for common and dominant species, while functional and phylogenetic compositions were more accurately predicted for rare and common species. In addition, community composition was strongly influenced by the surrounding habitat. Our findings demonstrate that a small set of acoustic indices, once validated by stratified ground truth data, provides a powerful tool for assessing restoration success over large tropical areas, even for functional composition of rare tropical birds.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

MoveTraits - A database for integrating animal behaviour into trait-based ecology

Trait-based approaches are key to understanding eco-evolutionary processes but rarely account for animal behaviour despite its central role in ecosystem dynamics. We propose integrating behaviour into trait-based ecology through movement traits - standardised and comparable measures of animal movement derived from biologging data, such as daily displacements or range sizes. Accounting for animal behaviour will advance trait-based research on species interactions, community structure, and ecosystem functioning. Importantly, movement traits allow for quantification of behavioural reaction norms, offering insights into species acclimation and adaptive capacity to environmental change. We outline a vision for a living global movement trait database that enhances trait data curation by (1) continuously growing alongside shared biologging data, (2) calculating traits directly from individual-level data using standardised, consistent methodology, and (3) providing information on multi-level (species, individual, within-individual) trait variation. We present a proof-of-concept MoveTraits database with 55 mammal and 108 bird species, demonstrating calculation workflows for 5 traits across multiple time scales. Movement traits have significant potential to improve trait-based global change predictions and contribute to global biodiversity assessments as Essential Biodiversity Variables. By making animal movement data more accessible and interpretable, this database could bridge the gap between movement ecology and biodiversity policy, facilitating evidence-based conservation.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Delayed recovery of seed-dispersal interactions after deforestation

Interactions between plants and animals are crucial for natural forest recovery because most plants rely on seed dispersal by animals to recolonize degraded habitats. Despite this importance, the recovery time of seed-dispersal interactions after deforestation is unknown. We compared the recovery time of the functional diversity of seed-dispersal interactions, frugivorous animals and fleshy-fruited plants by recording trait and interaction data along a chronosequence of tropical forest recovery. Using a Bayesian model, we estimated that plant functional diversity was high shortly after deforestation, but animal functional diversity recovered only after 39 years, and seed-dispersal interactions after 18 years. We demonstrate that seed-dispersal interactions need about two decades to functionally recover which provides a new benchmark for the timing of restoration projects in tropical forests.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Reassembly of a tropical rainforest ecosystem: A new chronosequence in the Ecuadorian Choco tested with the recovery of tree attributes

From hunting and foraging to clearing land for agriculture, humans modify forest biodiversity, landscapes, and climate. Forests constantly undergo disturbance-recovery dynamics and understanding them is a major objective of ecologists and conservationists. Chronosequences are a useful tool for understanding global restoration efforts. They represent a space-for-time substitution approach suited for the quantification of the resistance of ecosystem properties to withstand disturbance and the resilience of these properties until reaching pre-disturbance levels. Here we introduce a newly established chronosequence with 62 plots (50 50 m) in active cacao plantations and pastures, early and late regeneration, and mature old-growth forests, across a 200 km2 area in the extremely wet Choco rainforest. Our chronosequence covers by far the largest total area of plots compared to others in the Neotropics. Plots ranged from 159-615 masl in a forested landscape with 74 {+/-} 2.8 % forest cover within a 1-km radius including substantial old-growth forest cover. Land-use legacy and regeneration time were not confounded by elevation. We tested how six forest structure variables (maximum tree height and DBH, basal area, number of stems, vertical vegetation heterogeneity, and light availability), aboveground biomass (AGB), and rarefied tree species richness change along our chronosequence. Forest structure variables, AGB, and tree species richness increased with regeneration time and are predicted to reach similar levels to those in old-growth forests after ca. 30-116, 202, and 108 yrs, respectively. Compared to previous work in the Neotropics, old-growth forests in Canande accumulate high AGB that takes one of the largest time spans reported until total recovery. Our chronosequence comprises one of the largest tree species pools, covers the largest total area of regenerating and old-growth forests, and has higher forest cover than other Neotropical chronosequences. Hence, our chronosequence can be used to determine the time for recovery and stability (resistance and resilience) of different taxa and ecosystem functions, including species interaction networks. This integrative effort will ultimately help to understand how one of the most diverse forests on the planet recovers from large-scale disturbances.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Improved Estimation of Bird Abundance and Energy Consumption by Combining Point and Transect Observations

Point counts and transect surveys are both common methods for estimating bird abundance (by species, genus, or family) in a given environment. Sometimes both methods are used in the same study. Point counts reflect abundance directly, while transect observations of bird feeding instances reflect both the bird abundance and the mean energy consumption rate per bird. In this research we develop an improved estimator of bird abundance based on both sets of measurements, and derive error bars for these abundance estimates. The improved estimator is a linear combination of the two individual abundance estimates obtained from the two data types. The combination weights are obtained through a comparison of two separate energy estimates. The mathematical methods developed are applied to a dataset consisting of point counts and transect surveys of Ecuadorian frugivore bird species in six different types of environment (three elevations and two degrees of forestation). The improvement in accuracy achieved by this combined estimator is verified by simulations applied to bird family data. We also obtain 90% confidence intervals for the bird family relative abundance estimates, and verify the confidence intervals using simulations.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Elevation drives activity of soil bacteria, but not of bacterial viruses

Soil microbial diversity affects ecosystem functioning and global biogeochemical cycles. Soil bacterial communities catalyze a diversity of biogeochemical reactions and have thus sparked considerable scientific interest. One driver of bacterial community dynamics in natural ecosystems has so far been largely neglected: the predator-prey interactions between bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) and bacteria. To generate ground level knowledge on environmental drivers of these particular predator-prey dynamics we propose an activity-based ecological framework to simultaneous capture community dynamics of bacteria and bacteriophages in soils. An ecological framework and specifically the analyses of community dynamics across latitudinal and altitudinal gradients have been widely used in ecology to understand community-wide responses of innumerable taxa to environmental change, in particular to climate. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the activity of bacteria and bacteriophages co-decline across an elevational gradient. We used metatranscriptomics to investigate bacterial and bacteriophage activity patterns at 5 sites across 400 elevational meters in the Swiss Alps in 2015 and 2017. We found that metabolic activity (transcription levels) of bacteria declined significantly with increasing elevation, but activity of bacteriophages did not. We showed that bacteriophages are consistently active in soil along the entire gradient. Bacteriophage activity pattern, however, is divergent from that of their putative bacterial prey. Future efforts will be necessary to link the environment-activity relationship to predator-prey dynamics, to understand the magnitude of viral contributions to mobilize bacterial cell carbon when infection causes bacterial cell death, a process that may represent an overlooked component of soil biogeochemical cycles.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Global and regional ecological boundaries drive abrupt changes in avian frugivory interactions

Species interactions can propagate disturbances across space, though ecological and biogeographic boundaries may limit this spread. We tested whether large-scale ecological boundaries (ecoregions and biomes) and human disturbance gradients increase dissimilarity among ecological networks, while accounting for background spatial and elevational effects and differences in network sampling. We assessed network dissimilarity patterns over a broad spatial scale, using 196 quantitative avian frugivory networks (encompassing 1,496 plant and 1,003 bird species) distributed across 67 ecoregions and 11 biomes. Dissimilarity in species and interactions, but not in network structure, increased significantly across ecoregion and biome boundaries and along human disturbance gradients. Our findings suggest that ecological boundaries contribute to maintaining the worlds biodiversity of interactions and mitigating the propagation of disturbances at large spatial scales. One-Sentence SummaryEcoregions and biomes delineate the large-scale distribution of plant-frugivore interactions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Community-wide seed dispersal distances peak at low levels of specialisation in size-structured networks

Network approaches provide insight into the complex web of interspecific interactions that structure ecological communities. However, because data on the functional outcomes of ecological networks are very rarely available, the effect of network structure on ecosystem functions, such as seed dispersal, is largely unknown. Here, we develop a new approach that is able to link interaction networks to a trait-based seed-dispersal model to estimate community-wide seed dispersal distances. We simulated networks, using a niche model based on size-matching between plants and birds, that varied in the degree of niche partitioning. We found that community-wide dispersal distances were longest when networks had low degrees of niche partitioning. We further found that dispersal distances of plant species with small fruits peaked in models without niche partitioning, whereas dispersal distances of medium and large-fruited plants peaked at low degrees of niche partitioning. Our simulations demonstrate that the degree of niche partitioning between species is an important determinant of the ecological functions derived from ecological networks and that simulation approaches can provide new insights into the relationship between the structural and functional components of ecological networks.

ecology↗