Anikó B. Tóth

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at UNSW Sydney

Antarctica, Earth’s least understood and most remote continent, is threatened by human disturbances and climate-related changes, underscoring the imperative for biodiversity inventories to inform conservation. Antarctic ecosystems support unique species and genetic diversity, deliver essential ecosystem services and contribute to planetary stabilit...

Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, but the diversity and complexity of ecosystems makes estimating the severity of impacts and the resulting risk of collapse difficult. In this perspective, we conceptualise the challenge of understanding how climate change alters ecosystems, and how to reliably measure those changes in ecos...

Ecological interactions help determine the distribution of species across landscapes and play crucial roles in ecosystem services such as pollination, seed dispersal, and pest control1. Human disturbances, particularly habitat alteration, have the potential to modify or erase ecological interactions2,3 and so jeopardise the processes they control....

Ecological interactions help determine the distribution of species across landscapes and play crucial roles in ecosystem services such as pollination, seed dispersal, and pest control1. Human disturbances, particularly habitat alteration, have the potential to modify or erase ecological interactions2,3 and so jeopardise the processes they control....

Biotic homogenization—increasing similarity of species composition among ecological communities—has been linked to anthropogenic processes operating over the last century. Fossil evidence, however, suggests that humans have had impacts on ecosystems for millennia. We quantify biotic homogenization of North American mammalian assemblages during the...

Interspecific spatial associations (ISA), which include co‐occurrences, segregations, or attractions among two or more species, can provide important insights into the spatial structuring of communities. However, ISA has primarily been examined in the context of understanding interspecific interactions, while other aspects of ISA, including its rel...

Significance Mammals on landscapes within North America are now living in different climates than they did prior to major human expansions. Many smaller animals have expanded into climates now dominated by agricultural and urban regions; whereas large-bodied mammals were forced out of these climates and were relegated to colder, dryer regions. As a...

Recent renewed interest in using fossil data to understand how biotic interactions have shaped the evolution of life is challenging the widely held assumption that long-term climate changes are the primary drivers of biodiversity change. New approaches go beyond traditional richness and co-occurrence studies to explicitly model biotic interactions...

The late Quaternary of North America was marked by prominent ecological changes, including the end‐Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, the spread of human settlements and the rise of agriculture. Here we examine the mechanistic reasons for temporal changes in mammal species association and body size during this time period. Building upon the co‐occu...

Interspecific spatial associations (ISA), which include co-occurrences, segregations, or attractions among two or more species, have been an under-represented topic in biodiversity science and in large-scale assessments of biodiversity change in the anthropocene. Also, ISA has not been perceived as a facet of biodiversity on par with beta diversity...

Extinction leads to restructuring By most accounts, human activities are resulting in Earth's sixth major extinction event, and large-bodied mammals are among those at greatest risk. Loss of such vital ecosystem components can have substantial impacts on the structure and function of ecological systems, yet fully understanding these effects is chal...

Human population has exponentially grown since the last glaciation, especially across temperate areas with easy access to water sources, excluding mammal species from their former habitats. Thus, we anticipate a change in environmental niche preferences for temperature and precipitation as increased human population forces mammal species into more...

Large mammals are at disproportionately high risk of extinction globally, and the ecological impacts of their loss will last beyond our lifetimes. Research shows that the end-Pleistocene mass extinction of large mammals left a significant ecological legacy, from shifting vegetation and fire regimes to changes in nutrient cycling and biogeochemistry...

Human population has exponentially grown since the last glaciation, especially across temperate areas with easy access to water sources, excluding mammal species from their former habitats. Thus, we anticipate a change in environmental niche preferences for temperature and precipitation as increased human population forces mammal species into more...

Significance The living conditions of plant-eating mammals can be modeled by reverse-engineering the functional shapes of their teeth. Here we introduced and tested a scoring scheme for describing functional properties of large mammalian herbivore teeth to capture their relationship to environmental conditions. We found that minimum Net Primary Pro...

Understanding how ecological communities are organized and how they change through time is critical to predicting the effects of climate change. Recent work documenting the co-occurrence structure of modern communities found that most significant species pairs co-occur less frequently than would be expected by chance. However, little is known about...

Comparisons between modern death assemblages and their source communities have demonstrated fidelity to species diversity across a variety of environments and taxonomic groups. However, differential species preservation and collection (including body-size bias) in both modern and fossil death assemblages may still skew the representation of other i...

Environmental conditions, dispersal lags, and interactions among species are major factors structuring communities through time and across space. Ecologists have emphasized the importance of biotic interactions in determining local patterns of species association. In contrast, abiotic limits, dispersal limitation, and historical factors have common...

Kenya is a world leader in conservation and host to one of the most diverse array of mammals on the planet. As a focus of scientific attention, it is important to be able to assess not only the current state of Kenya's mammal communities, but also how they have changed over anthropogenic timescales. Comprehensive lists of mammal species from known...

The potential for large-scale biodiversity losses as a result of climate change and human impact presents major challenges for ecology and conservation science. Governments around the world have established national parks and wildlife reserves to help protect biodiversity, but there are few studies on the long-term consequences of this strategy. We...

The three species of Acris (cricket frogs) have experienced widespread declines in the northern portions of their ranges in the eastern United States since the middle of the 20th Century. In A. blanchardi and A. crepitans, these declines have been observed for decades but remain unexplained. The recently discovered decline of A. gryllus in North Ca...

Background/Question/Methods It is commonly assumed that global biodiversity is in decline because of the increasing impact of anthropogenic influences, especially habitat loss. To mitigate habitat loss, many countries with biodiversity hotspots have attempted to preserve these by establishing protected areas where anthropogenic disturbances are m...