Andrés Viña

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

Many of the current protected areas worldwide are established for the conservation of particular species of interest, yet their benefits may go beyond these species since they could also contribute to the conservation of entire biodiversity pools. In addition, they may also contribute to the provision of ecosystem services. However, these benefits...

The light absorption coefficient of vegetation is related to the content and composition of pigments in the plant canopy. It is a useful metric for understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of the absorbed solar radiation, photosynthetic capacity, and productivity of vegetation. Still, its estimation in vivo is challenging due to the large va...

As the world grows more interconnected through the flows of people, goods, and information, many challenges are becoming more difficult to address since human needs are increasingly being met through global supply chains. Global shocks (e.g., war, economic recession, pandemic) can severely disrupt these interconnections and generate cascading conse...

The green leaf area index (GLAI) has been widely used in agriculture, forestry, and environmental sciences for the analysis and modeling of many biophysical processes of vegetation, including the attenuation of light through the canopy, transpiration, photosynthesis, and carbon and nutrient cycles. Nevertheless, its usefulness is hampered by the un...

Global transformation involved key trade-offs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption and interconnection have had trade-offs.

Human–environment interactions within and across borders are now more influential than ever, posing unprecedented sustainability challenges. The framework of metacoupling (interactions within and across adjacent and distant coupled human–environment systems) provides a useful tool to evaluate them at diverse temporal and spatial scales. While most...

Escalating human impacts on the Earth are creating unprecedented challenges, including the drastic degradation and loss of biodiversity worldwide [...]

Absorption of radiation in the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) region is significantly influenced by plant biochemistry, structural properties, and photosynthetic pathway. To understand and quantify the effects of these traits on absorbed PAR it is necessary to develop practical and reliable tools that are sensitive to these traits. Using...

Macrosystems are integrated human–natural systems, in recognition of the fact that virtually every natural system on Earth influences and is influenced by human activities, even over long distances. It is therefore crucial to incorporate inherent properties of broad-scale systems, such as human–nature connectivity and feedbacks at multi-scales, int...

Globally, the number and extent of terrestrial protected areas (PAs) are expanding rapidly. Nonetheless, their impacts on preventing forest loss and the factors influencing the impacts are not well understood, despite the critical roles of forests in biodiversity conservation, provision of ecosystem services, and achievement of the United Nations’...

The use of a charismatic umbrella species as surrogate for sympatric species is often advocated as an efficient approach. However, comprehensive evaluations from a spatio-temporal perspective are few, leaving the long-term effectiveness of such practices remain uncertain. We modeled the habitat change for giant panda and eight sympatric mammalian s...

The absorption of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) by different foliar pigments defines the amount of energy available for photosynthesis and also the need for photoprotection. Both characteristics reveal essential information about productivity, development, and stress acclimation of plants. Here we present an approach for the estimation...

Outputs of species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used as indicators of climate conditions favorable for species occurrence. When using these outputs to inform planning and decision making, it is essential that the uncertainties associated with the projections of present-day and future climatic suitability are carefully considered. Climate c...

Land-use changes across distant places are increasingly affected by international agricultural trade, but most of the impacts and feedback remain unknown. The telecoupling framework-an analytical tool for examining socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances-can be used to conceptualize the impacts of agricultural trade on land-use...

Research has shown that varying spatial scale through the selection of the total extent of investigation and the grain size of environmental predictor variables has effects on species distribution model (SDM) results and accuracy, but there has been minimal investigation into the interactive effects of extent and grain. To do this, we used a consis...

Objective: To evaluate the effects of fragmentation on tree species diversity at a regional scale. Scope: A procedure based on floristic similarity was developed to evaluate the effects of deforestation, and its resultant forest fragmentation, on tree species diversity at a regional scale. Methodology: Floristic similarity among twelve forest pat...

Protected areas (PAs) are considered a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation, and the number and extent of PAs are expanding rapidly worldwide. While designating more land as PAs is important, concerns about the degree to which existing PAs are effective in meeting conservation goals are growing. Unfortunately, conservation effectiveness of PAs...

In this chapter of the IBES Global Assesment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services we explored how global transformation involved key tradeoffs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption & interconnection have had tradeoffs.

In this Draft Chapter 2.1 of the IBES Global Assesment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services we explored how global transformation involved key tradeoffs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption & interconnection have had tradeoffs.

China has emerged as a global economic powerhouse after four decades of unprecedented growth. Such growth has generated many environmental challenges with enormous ecological, socioeconomic, and health consequences in China and beyond. Although the overall quality of air and water is starting to improve, both are still below national and internatio...

Increases in human population and per-capita consumption are putting enormous pressure on land resources. About 38% of the Earth’s land area is being used in agricultural production [1], with about half (ca. 31%) of the remaining land being under forest cover [2] and the other half being less suitable for agricultural production due to edaphic, top...

Multiple factors introduce uncertainty into projections of species distributions under climate change. The uncertainty introduced by the choice of baseline climate information used to calibrate a species distribution model and to downscale global climate model (GCM) simulations to a finer spatial resolution is a particular concern for mountainous r...

Derivation of the future projections using the delta method. (DOCX)

The 21 bamboo species evaluated in this study. (DOCX)

Spatial variations of the 19 baseline bioclimatic variables for the baseline remotely-sensed (RS) dataset and elevation of the study region. The bioclimatic variables are generated based on temperature (units of °C * 10) and precipitation (units of mm). The bioclimatic variables are long-term averages of annual mean temperature (bio1); mean diurnal...

The partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) test results for 10 replication runs for 21 bamboo species and three calibrations. The calculations were performed using an R package available at https://github.com/vijaybarve/ENMGadgets. The calculations employed a random sample of 50% of the testing points for bootstrapping...

Centroids (WGS 1984 UTM Zone 48N projection) of the 1 km x 1 km grid cells with at least one presence point for the 21 bamboo species included in the MaxEnt modeling. (XLSX)

Differences in the probability of presence between the future (2061–2080) and baseline climate periods for F. denudata, as estimated using the RS5 MaxEnt calibration. The results shown here used the “clamping” option in MaxEnt where variables outside the training range are treated as though they are at the limit of the training range. The 17 GCMs a...

The 19 bioclimatic variables used in this study. (DOCX)

The true skill statistic (TSS) evaluation of model performance for the baseline climate conditions averaged over 10 replication runs for the 21 bamboo species and three model calibrations when using 11 thresholds for converting probabilities to binary predictions of species presence. The numbers 1 through 11 in the table stand for the following thr...

Spatial variations of the 19 bioclimatic variables for the baseline WorldClim (WC) dataset and the elevation of the study region. The bioclimatic variables were generated based on temperature (units of °C * 10) and precipitation (units of mm). The bioclimatic variables are long-term averages of annual mean temperature (bio1); mean diurnal range (bi...

Scree plots of the principal components analyses (PCA) performed on the WorldClim (WC) and remotely-sensed (RS) datasets. (PDF)

Scale is a vital component to consider in ecological research, and spatial resolution or grain size is one of its key facets. Species distribution models (SDMs) are prime examples of ecological research in which grain size is an important component. Despite this, SDMs rarely explicitly examine the effects of varying the grain size of the predictors...

The conservation status of the iconic giant panda is a barometer of global conservation efforts. The IUCN Red List has downgraded the panda's extinction risk from "endangered" to "vulnerable". Newly obtained, detailed GIS and remotely sensed data applied consistently over the last four decades show that panda habitat covered less area and was more...

Water sustainability in megacities is a growing challenge with far reaching effects. Addressing sustainability requires an integrated, multidisciplinary approach able to capture interactions among hydrology, population growth, socioeconomic factors, and to reflect changes due to climate variability and land use. We developed a new systems modeling...

Urban areas such as megacities (those with populations greater than 10 million) are hotspots of global water use and thus face intense water management challenges. Urban areas are influenced by local interactions between human and natural systems and interact with distant systems through flows of water, food, energy, people, information, and capita...

Animals make choices about where to spend their time in complex and dynamic landscapes, choices that reveal information about their biology that in turn can be used to guide their conservation. Using GPS collars, we conducted a novel individual-based analysis of habitat use and selection by the elusive and endangered giant pandas (Ailuropoda melano...

One of the main factors affecting vegetation productivity is absorbed light, which is largely governed by chlorophyll. In this paper, we introduce the concept of chlorophyll efficiency, representing the amount of gross primary production per unit of canopy chlorophyll content (Chl) and incident PAR. We analyzed chlorophyll efficiency in two contras...

Forest loss is one of the most pervasive land surface transformations on Earth, with drastic effects on global climate, ecosystems, and human well-being. As part of biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation efforts, many countries, including China, have been implementing large-scale policies to conserve and restore forests. However, l...

With the rapid decline in biodiversity worldwide it is imperative to develop procedures for assessing changes in biodiversity across space. The synoptic view provided by imaging remote sensors constitutes a suitable approach for analyzing biodiversity from local to regional scales. A procedure based on the close relationship between floristic simil...

Conflicts between local people's livelihoods and conservation have led to many unsuccessful conservation efforts and have stimulated debates on policies that might simultaneously promote sustainable management of protected areas and improve the living conditions of local people. Many government-sponsored payments-for-ecosystem-services (PES) scheme...

Madagascar is renowned for the loss of the forested habitat of lemurs and other species endemic to the island. Less well known is that in the highlands, a region often described as an environmental “basket-case” of fire-degraded, eroded grasslands, woody cover has been increasing for decades. Using information derived from publically available high...

Increasingly, the world is becoming socioeconomically and environmentally connected, but many studies have focused on human-environment interactions within a particular area. Although some studies have considered the impacts of external factors, there is little research on multiple reciprocal socioeconomic and environmental interactions between a f...

Plants are essential for the survival and sustainability of both humans and wildlife species around the world. However, human activities have directly and indirectly affected almost all plants, which in turn have produced cascading effects on humans and wildlife through disruption of crucial ecosystem services and wildlife habitat. Understanding su...

Conserving wildlife while simultaneously meeting the resource needs of a growing human population is a major sustainability challenge. As such, using combined social and environmental perspectives to understand how people and wildlife are interlinked, together with the mechanisms that may weaken or strengthen those linkages, is of utmost importance...

Livestock production is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity worldwide. However, impacts of livestock on endangered species have been understudied, particularly across the livestock-wildlife interface in forested protected areas. We investigated the impact of an emerging livestock sector in China's renowned Wolong Nature Reserve for giant pa...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have increasingly been implemented to protect and restore ecosystems worldwide. The effectiveness of conservation investments in PES may differ under alternative policy scenarios and may not be sustainable because of uncertainties in human responses to policies and dynamic human-nature interactions. To assess t...

Many nature reserves are established to protect the habitat needs of particular endangered species of interest but their effectiveness for protecting other species is questionable. In this study, this effectiveness was evaluated in a nature reserve network located in the Qinling Mountains, Shaanxi Province, China. The network of reserves was establ...

Human-induced habitat loss and degradation are increasing the extinction probability of many wildlife species worldwide, thus protecting habitat is crucial. The habitat of thousands of imperiled wildlife species occurs in a variety of land management regimes (e.g., protected areas, multiple-use areas), each exerting differing effects. We used the g...

After long periods of deforestation, forest transition has occurred globally, but the causes of forest transition in different countries are highly variable. Conservation policies may play important roles in facilitating forest transition around the world, including China. To restore forests and protect the remaining natural forests, the Chinese go...

For decades, scholars have been trying to determine whether small or large groups are more likely to cooperate for collective action and successfully manage common-pool resources. Using data gathered from the Wolong Nature Reserve since 1995, we examined the effects of group size (i.e., number of households monitoring a single forest parcel) on bot...

The conversion of tropical forest ecosystems to agro-pastoral ecosystems and other land uses continues unabated in Latin America. The present document constitutes a comparative study in which the degree of forest fragmentation through a 23-year period (between 1973 and 1996) was evaluated in two areas located within the same ecological region, but...

Transitions in complex socio-ecological systems are intermediate phases between two successive and more stable periods or states and involve various societal, ecological, and biophysical changes that are often non-linear and inter-related. Understanding transitions is challenging but important for managing socio-ecological systems for achieving env...

Climate change is threatening global ecosystems through its impact on the survival of individual species and their ecological functions. Despite the important role of understorey plants in forest ecosystems, climate impact assessments on understorey plants and their role in supporting wildlife habitat are scarce in the literature. Here we assess cl...

Tropical deforestation is leading not only to losses of biodiversity but also to regional losses of vegetation productivity. However, in many areas the deforestation process is usually accompanied by a fast forest regeneration that produces a mosaic of forest patches in different successional stages. These successional stages have different product...

Vegetation indices (VIs), traditionally used for estimation of green leaf area index (gLAI), have different sensitivities along the range of gLAI variability. The goals of this study were to: (i) test 12 VIs for estimating gLAI in maize (Zea mays L.) and soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]; (ii) estimate gLAI in both crops without the need to reparame...

Vegetation indices (VIs), traditionally used for estimation of green leaf area index (gLAI), have different sensitivities along the range of gLAI variability. The goals of this study were to: (1) test twelve VIs for estimating maize and soybean gLAI; (2) estimate gLAI in both crops without the need to re-parameterize the model for different crops;...

Protected areas worldwide are facing increasing pressures to co-manage human development and biodiversity conservation. One strategy for managing multiple uses within and around protected areas is zoning, an approach in which spatial boundaries are drawn to distinguish areas with varying degrees of allowable human impacts. However, zoning designati...