David Roberts

Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute | ABMI

Robust scientific inference is crucial to ensure evidence-based decision making. Accordingly, the selection of appropriate statistical tools and experimental designs is integral to achieve accuracy from data analytical processes. Environmental monitoring of water quality has become increasingly common and widespread as a result of technological adv...

In the past decade, a large volume of peer‐reviewed papers have examined potential impacts of oil and gas resource extraction in the Canadian oil sands. A large proportion focus on terrestrial biology: wildlife, birds, and vegetation. We provide a qualitative synthesis of the condition of the environment in the oil sands region from 2009‐2020 to id...

Although challenging to develop and operate, some degree of integrated monitoring is often necessary, especially at regional scales, to address the complex questions of environmental management and regulation. The concept of integration is well-understood, but its practice across programs and studies can be diverse suggesting a broader examination...

Desire to document and understand the cumulative implications of oil sands development in the ambient environment of northeastern Alberta has motivated increased investment and release of information in the last decade. Here, we summarise the knowledge presented in the theme‐based review papers within this special issue, including air, surface wate...

Warming temperatures are advancing the timing of seasonal vegetation development in the extratropics, altering plant–animal interactions and increasing the risk of trophic asynchrony. Forest understories are critical yet under-observed ecosystems in which phenological patterns are both altered and obscured by overstory trees. We address the challen...

Ecological analyses often incorporate high‐resolution environmental data to capture species‐environment relationships in modelling applications, and downscaled climate data are increasingly being used for such analyses. While such data products provide high precision, the accuracy of these data is seldom directly tested. Consequently, introduced bi...

As climatic conditions shift in coming decades, persistence of many populations will depend on their ability to colonize habitat newly suitable for their climatic requirements. Opportunities for such range shifts may be limited unless areas that facilitate dispersal under climate change are identified and protected from land uses that impede moveme...

Habitat fragmentation is typically seen as inhibiting movement via erosion in connectivity, although some patterns of early-phase disturbance, such as narrow linear disturbances in otherwise undisturbed forests, may actually facilitate the dispersal of certain species. Such features are common in Alberta’s oil sands region as legacies from seismic...

In ecology, the true causal structure for a given problem is often not known, and several plausible models and thus model predictions exist. It has been claimed that using weighted averages of these models can reduce prediction error, as well as better reflect model selection uncertainty. These claims, however, are often demonstrated by isolated ex...

As evidenced by past climatic refugia, locations projected to harbor remnants of present-day climates may serve as critical refugia for current biodiversity in the face of modern climate change. We mapped potential climatic refugia in the future across North America, defined as locations with increasingly rare climatic conditions. We identified the...

Using species distribution models and information on genetic structure and within-population variance observed in a series of common garden trials, we reconstructed a historical biogeography of trembling aspen in North America. We used an ensemble classifier modelling approach (RandomForest) to reconstruct palaeoclimatic habitat for the periods 21,...

As most regions of the earth transition to altered climatic conditions, new methods are needed to identify refugia and other areas whose conservation would facilitate persistence of biodiversity under climate change. We compared several common approaches to conservation planning focused on climate resilience over a broad range of ecological setting...

Ecological data often show temporal, spatial, hierarchical (random effects), or phylogenetic structure. Modern statistical approaches are increasingly accounting for such dependencies. However, when performing cross-validation, these structures are regularly ignored, resulting in serious underestimation of predictive error. One cause for the poor p...

All of today's species have proven their ability to cope with climate change during the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Quaternary, but future migration requirements may be different regarding speed, direction, geographic barriers, and availability of nearby climate refugia. Here, we contribute a landscape-level climatic analysis of postglacial...

Metrics that synthesize the complex effects of climate change are essential tools for mapping future threats to biodiversity and predicting which species are likely to adapt in place to new climatic conditions, disperse and establish in areas with newly suitable climate, or face the prospect of extirpation. The most commonly used of such metrics is...

North American tree species, subspecies and genetic varieties have primarily evolved in a landscape of extensive continental ice and restricted temperate climate environments. Here, we reconstruct the refugial history of western North American trees since the last glacial maximum using species distribution models, validated against 3571 palaeoecolo...

The velocity of climate change is an elegant analytical concept that can be used to evaluate the exposure of organisms to climate change. In essence, one divides the rate of climate change by the rate of spatial climate variability to obtain a speed at which species must migrate over the surface of the earth to maintain constant climate conditions....

Climate change vulnerability assessments for species of conservation concern often use species distribution and ecological niche modeling to project changes in habitat. One of many assumptions of these approaches is that food web dependencies are consistent in time and environmental space. Species at higher trophic levels that rely on the availabil...

Validation statistics for P. engelmannii and P. glauca model projections for each time period within each GCM.

Estimates of pairwise linkage disequilibrium between informative nucleotide sites across 23 genes in 132 individuals in the Picea glauca x P. engelmannii hybrid zone.

Differences among genotypic classes for phenotypic traits based on introgress hybrid index estimates Table S2 Least square means (lsmeans) and standard errors (stderr) for height measurements (cm) at different ages among genotypic classes tested in seed planning zones based on introgress hybrid index estimates Table S3 Least square means and standa...

We evaluate genetic test plantations of North American Douglas-fir provenances in Europe to quantify how tree populations respond when subjected to climate regime shifts, and we examined whether bioclimate envelope models developed for North America to guide assisted migration under climate change can retrospectively predict the success of these pr...

1.The maintenance of species boundaries despite interspecific gene flow has been a continuous source of interest in evolutionary biology. Many hybridizing species have porous genomes with regions impermeable to introgression, conferring reproductive barriers between species. 2.We used ecological niche modeling to study the glacial and postglacial r...

To assess the realism of habitat projections in the context of climate change, we conduct independent evaluations of twelve species distribution models, including three novel ecosystem-based modelling techniques. Habitat hindcasts for 24 western North American tree species were validated against 931 palaeoecological records from 6000, 11000, 14000,...

Aim We assess the realism of bioclimate envelope model projections for anticipated future climates by validating ecosystem reconstructions for the late Quaternary with fossil and pollen data. Specifically, we ask: (1) do climate conditions with no modern analogue negatively affect the accuracy of ecosystem reconstructions? (2) are bioclimate envelo...