Andrew Gonzalez

McGill University | McGill · Department of Biology

The biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems globally is facing severe threats due to various anthropogenic stressors, such as habitat degradation, introduction of invasive species, and pollution. Assessing the effects of human‐induced environmental stressors on population and community persistence requires accurate biodiversity estimates. While envir...

Selecting biodiversity indicators to report national and subnational progress towards the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is a major challenge, one made even more urgent by the fast approaching 2030 targets. To efficiently identify appropriate indicators, the selection process must be streamlined, while remaining transparent, e...

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has greatly evolved since it was first proposed and, as it gained popularity, has been used in diverse applications. Today, ES are an important part of global and national environmental policies. In this context, there is a call for the monitoring of ES to support their management. The proliferation of terms u...

National, subnational, and supranational entities are creating biodiversity strategy and action plans (BSAPs) to develop concrete commitments and actions to curb biodiversity loss, meet international obligations, and achieve a society in harmony with nature. In light of policymakers' increasing recognition of genetic diversity in species and ecosys...

Biodiversity loss is a critical global challenge. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals to protect ecosystems, halt species loss, and enhance biodiversity. The GBF’s Monitoring Framework requires countries to track progress toward biodiversity targets using a standardized set of indicators that summarize comp...

Environmental stress caused by anthropogenic impacts is increasing worldwide. Understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences for biodiversity will be crucial for our ability to respond effectively. Historical exposure to environmental stress is expected to select for resistant species, shifting community composition towards more stress-...

The failure to halt the global decline in biodiversity by 2020 contributedto the adoption of the ambitious Kunming-Montreal Global BiodiversityFramework, which includes transparency and responsibility as foundations.The Global Biodiversity Framework identifies the actions needed so thatsocieties are living in harmony with nature by 2050. To support...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is the most ambitious agreement on biodiversity conservation and sustainable use to date. It calls for a whole-of government and whole-of-society approach to halt and reverse biodiversity loss worldwide. The Monitoring Framework of the GBF lays out how Parties to the Convention on Biological...

Following the adoption of the Post-2020 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) there is a clear science-policy need to protect habitat connectivity and track its change over time to safeguard biodiversity and inform conservation planning. In response to this need we describe an analyt...

Metacommunity ecology has shown that connectivity is important for the persistence of a species locally and across connected ecosystems, however we do not know if ecological effects in freshwater ecosystems exposed to biocides leaking from agriculture depend on metaecosystem connectivity. We experimentally replicated metaecosystems in the laborator...

In the absence of forest ecosystem time series data, monitoring proxies such as the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) can inform the capacity of forests to provide ecosystem services. We used MODIS-derived EVI at 250 m and 16-day resolution and Breaks for Additive and Seasonal Trend (BFAST) algorithms to monitor forest EVI changes (breaks and trends)...

In the Anthropocene, ecosystems are changing along with their capacity to support human well‐being. Monitoring ecosystem services (ESs) is required to assess the changing state of human–nature interactions. To standardize the monitoring of multiple facets of ESs, the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) recently pr...

Monitoring of global climate regulation ecosystem services is needed to inform national accounts, meet emission targets, and evaluate nature-based climate solutions. As carbon monitoring is context-dependent, the most useful methodological approach will depend on the spatial extent and resolution, temporal frequency, baseline, available data, fundi...

Globally, national, subnational, and supranational entities are creating Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans, to develop concrete commitments and actions to curb biodiversity loss, meet international obligations and achieve a society in harmony with nature. In light of policy makers' increasing recognition of genetic diversity in helping species...

Connectivity is important for the structure and functioning of metaecosystems. We experimentally replicated metaecosystems in the laboratory using gradostats - a modified chemostat with flasks linked by a controlled flow of medium - as a model system. Metaecosystems were represented in our experiment as chain of flasks connected by spatial flows of...

Protecting habitat connectivity in fragmented landscapes is essential for safeguarding biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Following the Post-2020 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) there is a clear science-policy need to assess habitat connectivity and track its ch...

Ecosystems are connected by flows of nutrients and organisms. Changes to connectivity and nutrient enrichment may destabilise ecosystem dynamics far from the nutrient source. We used gradostats to examine the effects of trophic connectivity (movement of consumers and producers) versus nutrient‐only connectivity on the dynamics of Daphnia pulex (con...

Theory predicts that biodiversity changes due to climate warming can mediate the rate of disease emergence. The mechanisms linking biodiversity-disease relationships have been described both theoretically and empirically but remain poorly understood. We investigated the relations between host diversity and abundance and Lyme disease risk in souther...

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

This issue addresses the multifaceted problems of understanding biodiversity change to meet emerging international development and conservation goals, national economic accounting and diverse community needs. Recent international agreements highlight the need to establish monitoring and assessment programmes at national and regional levels. We iden...

The causes of biodiversity change are of great scientific interest and central to policy efforts aimed at meeting biodiversity targets. Changes in species diversity and high rates of compositional turnover have been reported worldwide. In many cases, trends in biodiversity are detected, but these trends are rarely causally attributed to possible dr...

Effective conservation of ecological communities requires accurate and up-to-date information about whether species are persisting or declining to extinction. The persistence of an ecological community is supported by its underlying network of species interactions. While the persistence of the network supporting the whole community is the most rele...

Predicting the spread of populations across fragmented habitats is vital if we are to manage their persistence in the long term. We applied network theory with a model and an experiment to show that spread rate is jointly defined by the configuration of habitat networks (i.e., the arrangement and length of connections between habitat fragments) and...

Ecosystems are connected by flows of nutrients and organisms. Changes to connectivity and nutrient enrichment may destabilise ecosystem dynamics far from the nutrient source. We used gradostats to examine the effects of trophic connectivity (movement of consumers and producers) versus nutrient-only connectivity in different metaecosystem configurat...

Ecosystems are composed of networks of interacting species. These interactions allow communities of species to persist through time through both neutral and adaptive processes. Despite their importance, a robust understanding of (and ability to predict and forecast) interactions among species remains elusive. This knowledge-gap is largely driven by...

Habitat destruction and fragmentation are principal causes of species loss. While a local population might go extinct, a metapopulation—populations inhabiting habitat patches connected by dispersal—can persist regionally by recolonizing empty patches. To assess metapopulation persistence, two widely adopted indicators in conservation management are...

This week, Montreal, Canada, is at the epicenter of international negotiations for biodiversity. Thousands of people from around the world are attending the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) to witness the negotiation of a new Global Biodiversity Framework. Its goals and targets replace...

Beta diversity---the variation among community compositions in a region---is a fundamental indicator of biodiversity. Despite a diverse set of measures to quantify beta diversity, most measures have posited that beta diversity is maximized when each community has one distinct species. However, this postulate has ignored the importance of non-additi...

A ubiquitous pattern in ecological systems is that more abundant species tend to be more generalist; that is, they interact with more species or can occur in wider range of habitats. However, there is no consensus on whether generalism drives abundance (a selection process) or abundance drives generalism (a drift process). As it is difficult to con...

Context An important output of connectivity science is the identification of priority areas for the conservation of landscape connectivity. However, current connectivity conservation planning methods rarely take into account risks associated with future land use and climate change, and seldom incorporate stakeholder perceptions of connectivity prio...

Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...

Effective conservation of ecological communities requires accurate and up-to-date information about whether species are persisting or declining to extinction. The persistence of ecological communities is largely supported by its structured architecture of species interactions, known as an ecological network. While the persistence of the network sup...

Governments are negotiating actions intended to halt biodiversity loss and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. Here, we show that bending the curve for biodiversity is possible, but only if actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner. Connecting these actions to biodiversity outcomes and tracking progress remain a challenge.

Designing effective habitat and protected area networks, which sustain species-rich communities is a critical conservation challenge. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new computational methods for analyzing and prioritizing the connectivity needs of multiple species. We argue that the goal of prioritizing habitat for multispecies conn...

Agrochemicals often contaminate freshwater bodies, affecting microbial communities that underlie aquatic food webs. For example, the herbicide glyphosate has the potential to indirectly select for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Such cross-selection could occur if the same genes (encoding efflux pumps, for example) confer resistance to both glyphosa...

Primary parasitoid species, usually Hymenopteran wasp species, contribute to pest regulation services in agroecosystems by parasitizing crop pests and reducing their abundance. However, this positive effect can be limited if primary parasitoids themselves are parasitized by secondary parasitoids, also known as hyperparasitoids. These trophic dynami...

Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urg...

When environmental stressors of high intensity are sustained for long periods of time, populations face high probabilities of being extirpated. However, depending on the intensity of the stressor, large populations with sufficient genetic diversity may persist. We report the results of an experiment that tracked the persistence of Daphnia populatio...

Agrochemicals often contaminate freshwater bodies, affecting microbial communities that underlie aquatic food webs. For example, Roundup, a widely-used glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH), has the potential to indirectly select for antibiotic resistant bacteria. Such cross-selection could occur, for example, if the same genes ( e . g . encoding efflux...

Designing effective habitat and protected area networks, which sustain species-rich communities is a critical conservation challenge. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new computational methods for analyzing and prioritizing the connectivity needs of multiple species. We argue that the goal of multispecies connectivity prioritizations...

Environmental fluctuations influence patterns of synchrony and stability in species abundances. Most of our understanding of synchrony and stability stems from competitive community and metacommunity ecology, when in reality species interact in more complex ways. Therefore, there is a mounting need for the integration of multi‐trophic interactions...

Time is running out to limit further devastating losses of biodiversity and nature's contributions to humans. Addressing this crisis requires accurate predictions about which species and ecosystems are most at risk to ensure efficient use of limited conservation and management resources. We review existing biodiversity projection models and discove...

Feedbacks are an essential feature of resilient socio-economic systems, yet the feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing are not fully accounted for in global policy efforts that consider future scenarios for human activities and their consequences for nature. Failure to integrate feedbacks in our knowledge frameworks...

The demand the human population is placing on the environment has triggered accelerated rates of biodiversity change and created trade-offs among the ecosystem services we depend upon. Decisions designed to reverse these trends require the best possible information obtained by monitoring ecological and social dimensions of change. Here, we conceptu...

Networks of species interactions underpin numerous ecosystem processes, but comprehensively sampling these interactions is difficult. Interactions intrinsically vary across space and time, and given the number of species that compose ecological communities, it can be tough to distinguish between a true negative (where two species never interact) fr...

Anthropogenic environmental change is causing habitat deterioration at unprecedented rates in freshwater ecosystems. Despite increasing more rapidly than many other agents of global change, synthetic chemical pollution—including agrochemicals such as pesticides—has received relatively little attention in freshwater community and ecosystem ecology....

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04946-3

Agricultural pollution with fertilizers and pesticides is a common disturbance to freshwater biodiversity. Bacterioplankton communities are at the base of aquatic food webs, but their responses to these potentially interacting stressors are rarely explored. To test the extent of resistance and resilience in bacterioplankton communities faced with a...

The global impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change are interlinked, but the feedbacks between them are rarely assessed. Areas with greater tree diversity tend to be more productive, providing a greater carbon sink, and biodiversity loss could reduce these natural carbon sinks. Here, we quantify how tree and shrub species richness could affe...

Biological insurance theory predicts that, in a variable environment, aggregate ecosystem properties will vary less in more diverse communities because declines in the performance or abundance of some species or phenotypes will be offset, at least partly, by smoother declines or increases in others. During the past two decades, ecology has accumula...

Ecosystem processes vary temporally due to environmental fluctuations, such as when variation in solar energy causes diurnal cycles in primary production. This normal variation in ecosystem functioning may be disrupted and even lost if taxa contributing to functioning go extinct due to environmental stress. However, when communities are exposed to...

Paz‐Vinas, Jensen et al. (2021) comment on data and methodological limits of Millette, Fugère, Debyser et al. (2020)—some affect a small proportion of our data sets and analyses and others need to be tackled more generally. These points do not refute our main conclusion of no strong signal of human impacts on COI variation globally.

The biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationship is expected to be scale-dependent. The autocorrelation of environmental heterogeneity is hypothesized to explain this scale dependence because it influences how quickly biodiversity accumulates over space or time. However, this link has yet to be demonstrated in a formal model. Here, we...

Networks of species interactions can capture meaningful information on the structure and functioning of ecosystems. Yet the scarcity of existing data, and the difficulty associated with comprehensively sampling interactions between species, means that to describe the structure, variation, and change of ecological networks over time and space, we ne...

Paz-Vinas et al. (2021) comment on methodological and data-related limits of our paper (Millette et al. 2020), which affect a small proportion of our datasets and analyses. These points do not refute our conclusions. We address their comments and support the call for the development of best practices for future macrogenetics research.

Global social and economic changes, alongside climate change, are affecting the operating environment for agriculture, leading to efforts to increase production and yields, typically through the use of agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, expanded irrigation, and changes in seed varieties. Intensification, alongside the expansion of agric...

The biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationship is expected to be scale-dependent. The autocorrelation of environmental heterogeneity is hypothesized to explain this scale dependence because it influences how quickly biodiversity accumulates over space or time. However, this link has yet to be demonstrated in a formal model. Here we u...

Rapid evolution can sometimes prevent population extirpation in stressful environments, but the conditions leading to “evolutionary rescue” in metacommunities are unclear. Here we studied the eco-evolutionary response of microbial metacommunities adapting to selection by the antibiotic streptomycin. Our experiment tested how the history of antibiot...

Almost 50 years ago, Michael Rosenzweig pointed out that nutrient addition can destabilise food webs, leading to loss of species and reduced ecosystem function through the paradox of enrichment. Around the same time, David Tilman demonstrated that increased nutrient loading would also be expected to cause competitive exclusion leading to deleteriou...