
Charles MarshUniversity of Oxford | OX · Department of Plant Sciences
Charles Marsh
PhD
About
50
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 2013 - present
Position
- PhD Student
Publications
Publications (50)
The impacts of degradation and deforestation on tropical forests are poorly understood, particularly at landscape scales. We present an extensive ecosystem analysis of the impacts of logging and conversion of tropical forest to oil palm from a large-scale study in Borneo, synthesizing responses from 82 variables categorized into four ecological lev...
We welcome feedback on the range maps published in Marsh et al. (2022) where it constructively improves our knowledge on species distributions. Unfortunately, we are concerned that criticisms raised by Arbogast and Kerhoulas are steps backward, not forward, particularly as they did not access the original range map data of Marsh et al. (2022). We s...
All aspects of biodiversity research, from taxonomy to conservation, rely on data associated with species names. Effective integration of names across multiple fields is paramount and depends on the coordination and organization of taxonomic data. We assess current efforts and find that even key applications for well-studied taxa still lack commona...
Species sensitivity to forest fragmentation varies latitudinally, peaking in the tropics. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that historical landscape disturbance at higher latitudes has removed fragmentation-sensitive species or promoted the evolution of more resilient survivors. However, it is unclear whether this so-called extinction fi...
All aspects of biodiversity research, from taxonomy to conservation, rely on data associated with species names. Effective integration of names across multiple fields is paramount and depends on coordination and organization of taxonomic data. We assess current efforts and find that even key applications for well-studied taxa still lack commonality...
Species distribution models (SDMs) have become a common tool in studies of species–environment relationships but can be negatively affected by positional uncertainty of underlying species occurrence data. Previous work has documented the effect of positional uncertainty on model predictive performance, but its consequences for inference about speci...
Geographic range size is the most commonly implemented criterion of species’ extinction risk used in IUCN Red List assessments, especially for poorly-recorded species. IUCN applies two contrasting range size measures to capture different facets of a species’ distribution: Extent of Occurrence (EOO; Criterion B1) is the area bounding all known occur...
Species distribution models (SDMs) are key tools in biodiversity and conservation, but assessing their reliability in unsampled locations is difficult, especially where there are sampling biases. We present a spatially-explicit sensitivity analysis for SDMs – SDM profiling – which assesses the leverage that unsampled locations have on the overall m...
Tropical forests are threatened by degradation and deforestation but the consequences for these ecosystems are poorly understood, particularly at the landscape scale. We present the most extensive ecosystem analysis to date of the impacts of logging and conversion of tropical forest to oil palm from a large-scale study in Borneo, synthesizing respo...
Assessing and addressing biodiversity needs are of critical and time-sensitive importance, with the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’s Global Taxonomy Initiative underscoring the need to build capacity in how we conceptualize biodiversity (Abrahamse et al. 2021). Species—as biological units—and their names are the backbone for the data integ...
The representation of a land cover type (i.e. habitat) within an area is often used as an explanatory variable in species distribution models. However, it is possible that a simple binary presence/absence of the suitable habitat might be the most important determinant of the presence/absence of some species and, thus, be a better predictor of speci...
Selective logging is the most widespread habitat disturbance in tropical forests. Primary forest set‐asides along riparian zones are mandated in many countries and a key question is whether these riparian reserves provide biodiversity conservation benefits.
We characterise butterfly communities in fixed‐width riparian reserves of 30 m on each bank...
Aim:
Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroeco...
Climate-induced mass bleaching events are one of the greatest threats to coral reefs, causing widespread loss of coral cover. Drivers of recovery and adaptation for coral reefs in the face of repeated large-scale disturbances are unclear, with marked differences across geographies. Using a monitoring dataset lasting from 2005 to 2018, we documented...
Biodiversity conservation faces a methodological conundrum: Biodiversity measurement often relies on species, most of which are rare at various scales, especially prone to extinction under global change, but also the most challenging to sample and model. Predicting the distribution change of rare species using conventional species distribution mode...
Aim
The Area of Occupancy (AOO) of a species is often utilized to assess extinction risk for determining IUCN Red List status. However, the recommended raw‐counts method of summing occupied grid cells likely reflects only sampling effort, as the majority of species have not been sampled across their entire range at the fine grains required by IUCN....
The geographical area occupied by a species is a valuable measure for assessing its conservation status. Coarse-grained occupancy maps are available for many taxa, e.g., as atlases, but often at spatial resolutions too coarse for conservation use. However, mapping occupancy at fine spatial resolution across the entire extent of the species’ distrib...
Selective logging for timber production affects vast areas across the tropics, yet we lack detailed understanding of the impacts of logging intensity on biodiversity. These impacts can be studied at two levels: the impacts of logging intensity on overall diversity and community composition; and how logging intensity affects individual species' abun...
The area of occupancy (AOO) is a widely used index in conservation assessments, notably in criteria B2 of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red‐list. However, IUCN guidelines require assessing AOO at finer resolution than is generally available. For this reason, extrapolation techniques have been proposed to predict finer AO...
Aim
Thousands of kilometres of rainforest edges are created every year through forest fragmentation, but we have little knowledge of the impacts of edges on spatial patterns of species turnover and nestedness components of β‐diversity.
Location
A quasi‐experimental landscape in the north‐east Brazilian Amazon.
Methods
We sampled dung beetles and...
The increasing need for high quality Habitat/Land-Cover (H/LC) maps has triggered considerable research into novel machine-learning based classification models. In many cases, H/LC classes follow pre‐defined hierarchical classification schemes (e.g., CORINE), in which fine H/LC categories are thematically nested within more general categories. Howe...
Forest edges influence more than half of the world's forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantif...
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement
follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
Species distribution models ( SDM ) are widely used to predict occupancy patterns at fine resolution over wide extents. However, SDM s generally ignore the effect of biotic interactions and tend to overpredict the number of species that can coexist at a given location and time (hereafter, the alpha‐capacity). We developed an extension of SDM s that...
The observation that species may be positively or negatively associated with each other is at least as old as the debate surrounding the nature of community structure which began in the early 1900's with Gleason and Clements. Since then investigating species co-occurrence patterns has taken a central role in understanding the causes and consequence...
This chapter provides an overview of concepts of “scale” as used throughout this book, looking first at usage in English and then drawing upon some other languages represented in the SCALES project. It shows how “scale” is used primarily in a spatial sense, referring to various relationships among things of differing sizes. There are scales of patt...
This R package applies the probabilistic model of species co-occurrence (Veech 2013) to a set of species distributed among a set of survey or sampling sites. The algorithm calculates the observed and expected frequencies of co-occurrence between each pair of species. The expected frequency is based on the distribution of each species being random a...
Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...
The accurate sampling of communities is vital to any investigation of ecological processes and biodiversity. Dung beetles have emerged as a widely used focal taxon in environmental studies and can be sampled quickly and inexpensively using baited pitfalls. Although there is now a wealth of available data on dung beetle communities from around the w...
The number of individuals for each species captured by each bait type.
Breeding strategy and diel activity is taken from Feer and Pincebourde [40].
(DOCX)
Bubble plots of trap locations indicating species richness, abundance and spatial autocorrelation.
Bubble plots of trap locations. Bubble size represents species richness (a) and number of individuals (b) for each site. Colours represent dung type: human (red), 10% pig (orange), 50% pig (yellow), 90% pig (green), pig (dark green). There was signifi...
Individual-based species accumulation curves for each bait type. Individual-based species accumulation curves (lines) for dung beetle communities. Colours represent dung type: human (blue), 10% pig (red), 50% pig (yellow dashed), 90% pig (green dashed), pig (black). The blue polygon represents the standard error for human dung.
(TIF)
Species turnover, β‐diversity, underpins a number of ecological processes that define patterns of diversity. Estimates of β‐diversity are dependent upon the spatial scale investigated, and patterns may vary across spatial scales. This presents us with a logistical problem of how to sample sufficiently at fine, local scales through to broad, landsca...
The biological impacts of habitat fragmentation are routinely assessed using standard statistical modelling techniques that are used across many ecological disciplines. However, to assess the biological relevance of fragmentation impacts, we must consider an extra, spatial dimension to the standard statistical model: the biological importance of a...
Grassland ecosystems cover vast areas of the Earth's surface and provide many ecosystem services including carbon (C) storage, biodiversity preservation and the production of livestock forage. Predicting the future delivery of these services is difficult, because widespread changes in atmospheric CO(2) concentration, climate and nitrogen (N) inputs...
We surveyed the western dry forest and coastal forest of the Ampombofofo area in the extreme north of Madagascar for its herpetofauna. We recorded a total of nine amphibian and 46 reptile species via opportunistic searching and pitfall trapping. This is the first such survey and consequently providing new records for the area for all of the species...