Derek Andrew Corcoran

• University of Missouri

Widespread shrubification across the Arctic has been generally attributed to increasing air temperatures, but responses vary across species and sites. Wood structures related to the plant hydraulic architecture may respond to local environmental conditions and potentially impact shrub growth, but these relationships remain understudied. Using metho...

This chapter analyzes the available information regarding the main drivers of global change operating in Patagonia, including climate change and its impact on biodiversity, the introduction of exotic species, change in land use and cover, and some emerging drivers of global change such as harmful algal blooms (HABs) and the increase in connectivity...

Fine-grained environmental data across large extents are needed to resolve the processes that impact species communities from local to global scales. Groundbased images (GBIs) have the potential to capture habitat complexity at biologically relevant spatial and temporal resolutions. Moving beyond existing applications of GBIs for species identifica...

Soils host diverse communities of microorganisms essential for ecosystem functions and soil health. Despite their importance, microorganisms are not covered by legislation protecting biodiversity or habitats, such as the Habitats Directive. Advances in molecular methods have caused breakthroughs in microbial community analysis, and recent studies h...

(1) Earth’s biosphere is undergoing drastic reorganization due to the sixth mass extinction brought on by the Anthropocene. Impacts of local and regional extirpation of species have been demonstrated to propagate through the complex interaction networks they are part of, leading to secondary extinctions and exacerbating biodiversity loss. Contempor...

La gran variabilidad de los ambientes marinos en Chile está asociada a la longitud de su costa, la cual está regulada por diversos procesos oceanográficos que perfilan la distribución, abundancia y morfología de las especies marinas. Tegula atra es un gasterópodo marino de gran distribución en el Pacífico sur, cualidad que le permite ser un buen mo...

Urbanization effects have been studied all over the world, documenting impact in species richness, abundances and changes in species communities. Birds have been broadly used as study models. In general, urbanization affects birds, reducing species richness, especially in the urban core, and increasing species richness in areas with intermediate le...

Resumen. Este capítulo analiza la información disponible respecto de los principales motores de cambio global que operan en la Patagonia: cambio climático y su impac-to sobre la biodiversidad; la introducción de especies exóticas; cambio en el uso y cobertura del suelo, y algunos motores de cambio global emergentes tales como las floraciones algale...

Context Fire transforms, fragments and sometimes maintains forests, creating mosaics of burned and unburned patches. Highly mobile animals respond to resources in the landscape at a variety of spatial scales, yet we know little about their landscape-scale relationships with fire. Objectives We aimed to identify drivers of bat richness in a landsca...

Top-down and bottom-up forces determine ecosystem function and dynamics. Fisheries as a top-down force can shorten and destabilize food webs, while effects driven by climate change can alter the bottom-up forces of primary productivity. We assessed the response of a highly-resolved intertidal food web to these two global change drivers, using netwo...

Predictions of biodiversity trajectories under climate change are crucial in order to act effectively in maintaining the diversity of species. In many ecological applications, future predictions are made under various global warming scenarios as described by a range of different climate models. The outputs of these various predictions call for a re...

Climate change is causing species’ ranges to shift, many at unprecedented rates, all across the planet. This poses a challenge for planning and management of biodiversity conservation through area-based conservation, as conserved areas are fixed in place. However, nearly a decade of research shows that strategic planning for new conserved areas can...

Top-down and bottom-up forces determine ecosystem function and dynamics. Fisheries as a top-down force can shorten and destabilize food-webs, while climate-change driven effects can alter the bottom-up forces of primary productivity. We assessed the response of a highly-resolved intertidal food-web to these two global-change drivers, using network...

1. Biodiversity loss is one of the current drivers of global change with an acute impact on community structure. Different measures and tools (e.g., simulations of extinction events) have been developed to analyze the structure of ecological systems and their stability under biodiversity loss, especially in complex settings with multiple interactin...

Biodiversity loss is one of the current drivers of global change with an acute impact on community structure. Different measures and tools (e.g., simulations of extinction events) have been developed to analyze the structure of ecological systems and their stability under biodiversity loss, especially in complex settings with multiple interacting s...

As the SARS-Cov-2 virus spreads around the world afflicting millions of people, it has undergone divergent genetic mutations. Although most of these mutations are expected to be inconsequential, some mutations in the spike protein structure have been hypothesized to affect the critical stage at which the virus invades human cells, which could affec...

Ecosystems functioning is based on an intricate web of interactions among living entities. Most of these interactions are difficult to observe, especially when the diversity of interacting entities is large and they are of small size and abundance. To sidestep this limitation, it has become common to infer the network structure of ecosystems from t...

Limiting climate change to less than 2°C is the focus of international policy under the climate convention (UNFCCC), and is essential to preventing extinctions, a focus of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The post-2020 biodiversity framework drafted by the CBD proposes conserving 30% of both land and oceans by 2030. However, the combin...

Limiting climate change to less than 2°C is the focus of international policy under the climate convention (UNFCCC), and is essential to preventing extinctions, a focus of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The post‐2020 biodiversity framework drafted by the CBD proposes conserving 30% of both land and oceans by 2030. However, the combin...

Climate change research often relies on downscaled general circulation models (GCM), projections of future scenarios that are used to build ecological and evolutionary models. With more than 35 different GCMs widely available at a resolution of 10 km and finer, standardized methods to understand the differences among GCM projections in a region of...

Despite their differences, biological systems at different spatial scales tend to exhibit common organizational patterns. Unfortunately, these commonalities are often hard to grasp due to the highly specialized nature of modern science and the parcelled terminology employed by various scientific sub-disciplines. To explore these common organization...

Species loss is a non-random reality that worldwide ecosystems are living and the understanding of their consequences is a major challenge in ecology. In natural ecosystems, species are part of a complex network of ecological relationships. Hence, the loss of one species could trigger secondary extinction cascades difficult to predict. Therefore, i...

Species loss is a non-random reality that worldwide ecosystems are living and the understanding of their consequences is a major challenge in ecology. In natural ecosystems, species are part of a complex network of ecological relationships. Hence, the loss of one species could trigger secondary extinction cascades difficult to predict. Therefore, i...

Plague populations usually are kept at low densities, but suddenly they can generate outbreaks that cause economic damages in crops. We analyzed the outbreaks of Australian mice to have irregular dynamics, their economic impact on wheat crops, and the absence of a causal explanatory mechanism. We proposed an initial group of hypotheses associated w...

Many multi-regional studies investigating how available habitat area, energy availability, and historical refugia drive freshwater fish diversity have emphasized Northern Hemisphere and tropical areas. Furthermore, while many such studies have examined diversity drivers on basin-scale species richness (i.e., gamma diversity), they typically have no...

Aim Mediterranean Chile is part of the five recognized mediterranean‐type climates in the world and harbours a very rich floral diversity. Climate change has been reported as a significant threat to its biodiversity. We used the flora of Mediterranean Chile to analyse how biodiversity patterns, as measured by phylogenetic diversity, genus and speci...

Despite their obvious differences, biological systems at different scales tend to exhibit common organizational patterns. Unfortunately, these commonalities are usually obscured by the parcelled terminology employed by various scientific sub-disciplines. To explore these commonalities, this papers a comparative study of diverse applications of the...

At the end of the Pleistocene, South America witnessed the loss of an 83% of all megafaunal genera that inhabited the continent at that time. Among the taxa that disappeared were all the representatives of the Equidae family, including several species of Equus and Hippidion. Previous studies have investigated the causes behind the extinction of hor...

• Wildfires are increasing in incidence and severity across coniferous forests of the western United States, leading to changes in forest structure and wildlife habitats. Knowledge of how species respond to fire‐driven habitat changes in these landscapes is limited and generally disconnected from our understanding of adaptations that underpin respo...

Regions with Mediterranean-type climate are characterized by both high species richness and high levels of endemism. From the five recognised Mediterranean-type climates in the world, Mediterranean Chile (MedCh) harbour some of the world’s richest biota and diversity at the genus level. In MedCh, climate change has been reported as one of the signi...

The objectives of the NetworkExtinction package is to analyze and visualize the topology of food webs and its responses to the simulated extinction of species

•Biodiversity is an important ecosystem service provided by rangelands. However, the close link between biodiversity and rangelands often results in conflicts between human livelihood and biological conservation, as is occurring with the livestock-guanaco (Lama guanicoe) conflict in Patagonia, Chile.•Understanding community attitudes and perspectiv...

Castor canadensis is an invasive species in Southern South America, which since 1946, the time of their introduction, was dispersed from Tierra del Fuego Island through some areas of Fueguian Archipelago and the southernmost portion of the American Continent. Beavers had arrived even to Última Esperanza Province at 2013, where one specimen was iden...

Twenty beavers Castor canadensis (Castoridae) were initially introduced in the Argentinean portion of Tierra del Fuego Island, from where they have occupied most of the Fuegian Archipelago and even reached the continent. This invasion is causing great damage to the subantarctic forest ecosystems, and it is not known how fast the species is spreadin...

Castor canadensis is an invasive species in Southern South America, which since 1946, the time of their introduction, was dispersed from Tierra del Fuego Island through some areas of Fueguian Archipelago and the southernmost portion of the American Continent. Beavers had arrived even to Última Esperanza Province at 2013, where one specimen was iden...