Adrian Christopher Newton

Bournemouth University | BU · Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences Group

The green economy is widely seen as a potential solution to current global economic and environmental crises, and a potential mechanism by which sustainable development might be achieved in practice. Considerable investments are now being made into the development of green technology, renewable energy, biodiversity conservation, resource efficiency...

Forests hold a significant proportion of global biodiversity and terrestrial carbon stocks and are at the forefront of human-induced global change. The dynamics and distribution of forest vegetation determines the habitat for other organisms, and regulates the delivery of ecosystem services, including carbon storage. Presenting recent research acro...

Biodiversity conservation approaches are increasingly being implemented at the landscape-scale to support the maintenance of metapopulations and metacommunities. However, the impact of such interventions on the provision of ecosystem services is less well defined. Here we examine the potential impacts of landscape-scale conservation initiatives on...

Although increasing efforts are being made to restore tropical forests, little information is available regarding the time scales required for carbon and plant biodiversity to recover to the values associated with undisturbed forests. To address this knowledge gap, we carried out a meta-analysis comparing data from more than 600 secondary tropical...

Most research on long-term human ecodynamics examines changes in the size and structure of human populations, often in relation to climate change. Here we offer an alternative perspective that draws on recent progress in conservation science, examining the causes and consequences of ecosystem collapse. We identify human actions that can cause abrup...

Assessing habitat loss effects on biodiversity is a major focus of ecological research. The relationship between habitat amount and biodiversity, postulated in the habitat amount hypothesis, is usually assessed at one point in time, which does not account for habitat loss as a temporal process. We examined habitat amount effects at two time periods...

Trees play vital roles in many of the world's ecosystems while providing many benefits to people. New evidence indicates that a third of tree species are threatened with extinction, representing a tree extinction crisis. Here we demonstrate how tree species extinction will lead to the loss of many other plants and animals and significantly alter th...

Societal Impact Statement Trees play vital roles in many of the world's ecosystems while providing many benefits to people. New evidence indicates that a third of tree species are threatened with extinction, representing a tree extinction crisis. Here we demonstrate how tree species extinction will lead to the loss of many other plants and animals...

Human beings are an active component of every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Although our local impact on the evolution of these ecosystems has been undeniable and extensively documented, it remains unclear precisely how our activities are altering them, in part because ecosystems are dynamic systems structured by complex, non-linear feedback proc...

The transformation and depletion of primary forest over the past few decades have placed almost half of the world's primate species under the threat of extinction. Developing any successful conservation program for primates requires distribution and demography data, as well as an understanding of the relationships between these factors and their ha...

Species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it remains unknown whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. Here, we analysed the trajectories of 1827 plant species over time intervals of up to 78years at 141sites across mountain summits, forests, and lowland grasslands in Europe. We found, albeit with...

Progress is being made in assessing the conservation status of ecosystems, notably through initiatives such as the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) and the NatureServe Conservation Status Assessment (NCS). Both of these approaches consider conservation status in terms of the risk of ecosystem collapse. However, the scientific understanding of ecos...

Concern is growing about ecosystem collapse, namely the abrupt decline or loss of an ecosystem resulting from human activities. While efforts to assess the risk of ecosystem collapse have developed at large spatial scales, less attention has been given to the local scales at which conservation management decisions are typically made. Development of...

Context Agricultural intensification is being widely pursued as a policy option to improve food security and human development. Yet, there is a need to understand the impact of agricultural intensification on the provision of multiple ecosystem services, and to evaluate the possible occurrence of tipping points. Objectives To quantify and assess t...

This study examines the influence of social network members (versus strangers) on sustainable food consumption choices to investigate how social influence can challenge the status quo in unsustainable consumption practices. We hypothesized that changes to individual consumption practices could be achieved by revealing ‘invisible’ descriptive and in...

There is a growing concern that many important ecosystems, such as coral reefs and tropical rain forests, might be at risk of sudden collapse as a result of human disturbance. At the same time, efforts to support the recovery of degraded ecosystems are increasing, through approaches such as ecological restoration and rewilding. Given the dependence...

Given the negative environmental impacts of intensive agriculture, there is an urgent need to reduce the impact of food production on biodiversity. Ecological restoration of farmland could potentially contribute to this goal. While the positive impacts of ecological restoration on biodiversity are well established, less evidence is available regard...

The direction and magnitude of long-term changes in local plant species richness are highly variable among studies, while species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it is unknown whether the nature of species turnover is idiosyncratic or whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. To address this questi...

ContextHistorical maps of land use/land cover (LULC) enable detection of landscape changes, and help to assess drivers and potential future trajectories. However, historical maps are often limited in their spatial and temporal coverage. There is a need to develop and test methods to improve re-construction of historical landscape change.Objectives...

• Mires are characterized by plant communities of high conservation and societal value, which have experienced a major decline in area in many parts of the world, particularly Europe. Evidence suggests that they may be particularly vulnerable to changes in climate and nutrient addition. Although they have been the focus of extensive paleoecological...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

This is the final of the Valuing Nature Demystifying Series, which provides a simple explanation of the concept of the 'tipping point' for policy-makers and practitioners involved in safeguarding and restoring nature and who may be well-placed to address tipping points, but may not necessarily be well versed in the science behind it. Tipping point...

The extinction debt, delayed species extinctions following landscape degradation, is a widely discussed concept. But a consensus about the prevalence of extinctions debts is hindered by a multiplicity of methods and a lack of comparisons among habitats. We applied three contrasting species–area relationship methods to test for plant community extin...

Context Studies evaluating biodiversity loss and altered ecosystem services have tended to examine changes over the last few decades, despite the fact that land use change and its negative impacts have been occurring over a much longer period. Examining past land use change, particularly over the long-term and multiple time periods, is essential fo...

Forests globally are facing an increasing number of threats from modified disturbance regimes, novel stressors and changing environmental conditions. This has ultimately resulted in declines in the ecological condition of many forest and woodland ecosystems, leading to widespread tree mortality and stand dieback. Effective indicators of overall woo...

How does environmental degradation affect economic development and employment? This report presents the results of research that addressed this question. The research was conducted by the project Tipping Points in Lowland Agricultural Landscapes (TPAL), which forms part of the Valuing Nature Programme. The research focused on the county of Dorset,...

Questions Has plant species richness in semi‐natural grasslands changed over recent decades? Do the temporal trends of habitat specialists differ from those of habitat generalists? Has there been a homogenization of the grassland vegetation?. Location Different regions in Germany and the United Kingdom. Methods We conducted a formal meta‐analysis...

Plant-pollinator networks have been widely used to understand the ecology of mutualistic interactions between plants and animals. While a number of general patterns have been identified, the mechanisms underlying the structure of plant-pollinator networks are poorly understood. Here we present an agent based model (ABM) that simulates the movement...

Model description according to the ODD protocol. (DOC)

Appendix. Details of study area and model. (DOC)

Netlogo model employed in the research. (ZIP)

Concern about abrupt and potentially irreversible ecosystem thresholds and tipping points is increasing, as they may have significant implications for natural capital and human wellbeing. Although well established in theory, there are few empirical studies that provide evidence for these phenomena in coastal and estuarine ecosystems, despite their...

The ongoing loss of global biodiversity suggests that established conservation practices have not been fully successful at halting species decline. Rewilding, a restoration strategy focused on restoring ecological processes, has become increasingly prominent as a potential means of addressing this problem. Rewilding has been described as a versatil...

Although it is widely assumed that business activity is dependent on flows of ecosystem services (ES), little evidence is available with which to evaluate this contention. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey of business dependencies on twenty-six different ES in the English county of Dorset, where the environment supp...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are widely acknowledged as important but are often neglected by ecosystem service assessments, leading to a representational bias. This reflects the methodological challenges associated with producing robust and repeatable CES valuations. Here we provide a comparative analysis of three approaches for non-monetary v...

Stem cuttings of five tree species from dry and semi-arid woodlands (Acacia tortilis, Prosopis juliflora, Terminalia spinosa, Terminalia brownii and Albizia guachapele) and seven species from moist tropical forests (Cordia alliodora, Vochysia hondurensis, Nauclea diderrichii, Ricinodendron heudelotii, Lovoa trichiliodes, Gmelina arborea, Eucalyptus...

Positive feedbacks in drivers of degradation can cause threshold responses in natural ecosystems. Though threshold responses have received much attention in studies of aquatic ecosystems, they have been neglected in terrestrial systems, such as forests, where the long time-scales required for monitoring have impeded research. In this study we explo...

Individual based model used in this study. (NLOGO)

The effect of feedbacks in mature tree death and juvenile mortality on predicted basal area over 100 years. Lines represent median basal area (BA) at each modelled time step, with red lines representing a model with no feedbacks and the blue lines representing a model with a spatial feedback in probability of death. Each graph represents a differen...

The effect of feedbacks in mature tree death and juvenile mortality on predicted tree stem density over 100 years. Lines represent median stem density at each modelled time step, with red lines representing a model with no feedbacks and the blue lines representing a model with a spatial feedback in probability of death. Each graph represents a diff...

Detailed description of individual based model used in this study. (DOCX)

The effect of feedbacks in mature tree death and juvenile mortality on predicted canopy cover over 100 years. Lines represent median canopy cover at each modelled time step, with red lines representing a model with no feedbacks and the blue lines representing a model with a spatial feedback in probability of death. Each graph represents a different...

Ecological thresholds, which represent points of rapid change in ecological properties, are of major scientific and societal concern. However, very little research has focused on empirically testing the occurrence of thresholds in temperate terrestrial ecosystems. To address this knowledge gap, we tested whether a number of biodiversity, ecosystem...

Resilience is increasingly being considered as a new paradigm of forest management among scientists, practitioners, and policymakers. However, metrics of resilience to environmental change are lacking. Faced with novel disturbances, forests may be able to sustain existing ecosystem services and biodiversity by exhibiting resilience, or alternativel...

Water is a fundamental resource, yet its spatiotemporal availability in East Africa is poorly understood. This is the area where most hominin first occurrences are located, and consequently the potential role of water in hominin evolution and dispersal remains unresolved. Here, we show that hundreds of springs currently distributed across East Afri...

Supplementary Figures and Supplementary Tables

Invasive plants can alter ecosystem properties, leading to changes in the ecosystem services on which humans depend. However, generalizing about these effects is difficult because invasive plants represent a wide range of life forms, and invaded ecosystems differ in their plant communities and abiotic conditions. We hypothesize that differences in...

Resilience is increasingly being incorporated into environmental policy at national and global scales. Yet resilience is a contested concept, with a wide variety of definitions proposed in the scientific literature, and little consensus regarding how it should be measured. Consequently, adoption of resilience as a policy goal presents risks to biod...

Extent of Occurrence (EOO) is a key metric in assessing extinction risk using the IUCN Red List categories and criteria. However, the way in which EOO is estimated from maps of species' distributions is inconsistent between assessments of different species, and between major taxonomic groups. It is often estimated from the area of mapped distributi...

Functional diversity (FD) is increasingly used as a metric to evaluate the impact of forest management strategies on ecosystem functioning. Management interventions that aim to maximise FD require knowledge of multiple environmental drivers of FD, which have not been studied to date in temperate coniferous production forests. We quantified the rela...

A report on the global timber trade, including a working list of timber tree taxa in commercial trade. Produced as part of PhD research with Bournemouth University and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). The full report and appendices are also available online through BGCI (https://www.bgci.org/news-and-events/news/1175/) and the Glo...

Setting aside overmature planted forests is currently seen as an option for preserving species associated with old-growth forests, such as those with dispersal limitation. Few data exist, however, on the utility of set-aside plantations for this purpose, or the value of this habitat type for biodiversity relative to old-growth semi-natural ecosyste...

Supplementary material.

Environmental characteristics have a major effect on the species composition of seasonally dry tropical forest. However, this effect has been little considered when describing secondary succession of this ecosystem. We tested the hypothesis that local environmental heterogeneity influences successional trajectories when high species richness is ava...

Conservation management is increasingly being required to support both the provision of ecosystem services and maintenance of biodiversity. However, trade‐offs can occur between biodiversity and ecosystems services. We examine whether such trade‐offs can be resolved through landscape‐scale approaches to management. We analysed the biodiversity valu...

There are widespread concerns that anthropogenic climate change will become a major cause of global biodiversity loss. However, the potential impact of climate change on the extinction risk of species remains poorly understood, particularly in comparison to other current threats. The objective of this research was to examine the relative impact of...

Although trees have high economic, cultural and ecological value, increasing numbers of species are potentially at risk of extinction because of forest loss and degradation as a result of human activities, including overharvesting, fire and grazing. Emerging threats include climate change and its interaction with the spread of pests and diseases. T...

While habitat fragmentation represents a major threat to global biodiversity, its impacts on provision of ecosystem services are largely unknown. We analysed biodiversity value and provision of multiple ecosystem services in 110 fragments of lowland heathland ecosystems in southern England, in which vegetation dynamics have been monitored for over...

Although the concept of resilience is increasingly being incorporated into environmental policy and linked to ecological restoration goals, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how resilience should be defined and measured in practice. Here we briefly review some of the definitions of resilience that have been proposed, including those refer...

Both active and passive forest restoration schemes are used in degraded landscapes across the world to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Restoration is increasingly also being implemented in biodiversity offset schemes as compensation for loss of natural habitat to anthropogenic development. This has raised concerns about the va...

The Tropical Andes are characterized by a high level of endemism and plant species richness but are under pressure from human activities. We present the first regional conservation assessment of upper montane tree species in this region. We identified 3,750 tree species as occurring in this region, of which 917 were excluded because of a lack of da...

Background . At least a fifth of tropical forests have been logged in the recent past. This practice is an important source of timber but there are concerns about its long-sustainability and impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage. However, there is wide variation in the impacts of logging, making generalisation, and thus policy implementation,...