Biology subjects

Shirey, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Shirey, V..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

The urban tree of life: quantifying relationships between body size and urban tolerance for more than 30,000 plant and animal species

Urbanization is a major global driver of biodiversity change, with species responses to urban settings ranging from avoidance to exploitation. To better understand these responses, we conducted a global analysis of urban relative affinity inferred from occurrence data across more than 30,000 animal and plant species. Our synthesis showed a consistent pattern across taxa and biogeographic regions: many species are urban avoiders, while few thrive as urban exploiters--a pattern we coin "Species Urbanness Distribution". We then assessed whether body size, an integrative ecological trait fundamental to space use, mobility, metabolism, and environmental sensitivity, showed consistent associations with urban affinity among species and across 371 taxonomic families. Analyses were conducted at the interspecific level and focused primarily on variation among taxonomic families (with an accompanying application to view results available here: https://globalecologyresearchgroup.github.io/body_size_results_visualization/). Larger body sizes were generally associated with greater urban affinity in plants compared to animals, though these size-affinity relationships showed considerable variability among families. Our findings highlight the heterogeneous relationship between body size and urban affinity across the tree of life, underscoring the importance of tailored strategies to support urban biodiversity. This research advances ecological understanding of urban filtering and provides a framework for guiding biodiversity-sensitive urban planning amid accelerating global urbanization.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Deep computer vision reveals the mediation of thermal-melanism and body size by precipitation and sex in a threatened alpine butterfly, Parnassius smintheus

Insect morphologies are strongly tied to selective forces, yet due to variation in these forces and finite resources, insects must strategically invest in select morphologies while deprioritizing others. Melanism and body size may be one such potential trade-off that insects navigate and these two factors are important for fecundity, dispersal, thermoregulation, anti-desiccation, and immunity. In this work, we examined how sex and environmental factors mediate a potential body-size/melanism trade-off in the cold-adapted butterfly Parnassius smintheus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae). We used deep computer vision approaches and museum specimen photography to process over 1,000 images of the species. We found that body-size and melanism are strongly mediated by temperature and elevation (thermal-melanism hypothesis) and that precipitation mediates these slopes for males and females differently. Notably, under the wettest conditions, females exhibit stronger concordance with the thermal-melanism hypothesis while the relationship for males is inverted, suggesting increased competition among males in cold-wet environments. Our results highlight the importance of considering sex when examining how the environment influences intraspecific morphological variation, especially under projected scenarios of global climate change.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Rising minimum temperatures contribute to 50 years of shifting Arctic and boreal butterfly communities in North America

AbstractGlobal climate change has been identified as a major driver of observed insect declines, yet in many regions there are critical knowledge gaps for how communities are responding to climate. Poleward regions are of particular interest because warming is most rapid while biodiversity data are most sparse. Building on recent advances in occupancy modeling of presence-only data, we reconstructed 50 years (1970-2019) of butterfly population trends in response to rising minimum temperatures in one of the most under sampled regions of the continent. Among 90 modeled species, we found that cold-adapted species are far more often in decline compared to their warm-adapted, more southerly distributed counterparts. Further, in a post-hoc analysis using species traits, we find that species range-wide average annual temperature and wingspan are a consistent predictor of occupancy changes. Species with warmer ranges and larger wingspans were most likely to be increasing in occupancy. Our results provide the first look at macroscale butterfly biodiversity shifts in a critically under sampled region of North America. Further, these results highlight the potential of leveraging the wealth of presence only data, the most abundant source of historical insect biodiversity. New approaches to the modeling of presence only data will match recent increases in community science participation with sparse historical records to reconstruct trends even in poorly sampled regions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Utilizing occupancy-detection models with museum specimen data: promise and pitfalls

Historical museum records provide potentially useful data for identifying drivers of change in species occupancy. However, because museum records are typically obtained via many collection methods, methodological developments are needed in order to enable robust inferences. Occupancy-detection models, a relatively new and powerful suite of methods, are a potentially promising avenue because they can account for changes in collection effort through space and time. Here we present a methodological road-map for using occupancy models to analyze historical museum records. We use simulated data-sets to identify how and when patterns in data and/or modelling decisions can bias inference. We focus primarily on the consequences of contrasting methodological approaches for dealing with species ranges and inferring species non-detections in both space and time. We find that not all data-sets are suitable for occupancy-detection analysis but, under the right conditions (namely, data-sets that span long durations and contain a high fraction of community-wide collections, or collection events that focus on communities of organisms), models can accurately estimate trends. Finally, we present a case-study on eastern North American odonates where we calculate long-term trends of occupancy by using our most robust workflow.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Closing Gaps But Increasing Bias In North American Butterfly Inventory Completeness

Aggregate biodiversity data from museum specimens and community observations have promise for macroscale ecological analyses. Despite this, many groups are under-sampled, and sampling is not homogeneous across space. Here we used butterflies, the best documented group of insects, to examine inventory completeness across North America. We separated digitally accessible butterfly records into those from natural history collections and burgeoning community science observations to determine if these data sources have differential spatio-taxonomic biases. When we combined all data, we found startling under-sampling in regions with the most dramatic trajectories of climate change and across biomes. We also found support for the hypothesis that community science observations are filling more gaps in sampling but are more biased towards areas with the highest human footprint. Finally, we found that both types of occurrences have familial-level taxonomic completeness biases, in contrast to the hypothesis of less taxonomic bias in natural history collections data. These results suggest that higher inventory completeness, driven by rapid growth of community science observations, is partially offset by higher spatio-taxonomic biases. We use the findings here to provide recommendations on how to alleviate some of these gaps in the context of prioritizing global change research.

ecology↗