Eben Goodale

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Verified

Eben verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

BirdNET is a popular machine learning tool for automated recognition of bird sounds. Here we evaluate how BirdNET settings affect the model performance both at vocalization and species levels, using 4,225 one-minute recordings from 67 recording locations worldwide. Giving equal importance to recall and precision, a low confidence score threshold (0...

Aim The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage t...

Context Urbanization has detrimental effects on biodiversity, yet how species respond to urban planning zoning outcomes and environmental changes at different spatial scales when selecting urban breeding habitats remains understudied. Mitigating such impacts on wildlife is instrumental to create biodiversity-friendly cities while accommodating urba...

Road verges have considerable potential to benefit wildlife, but in highly urbanised areas management often limits their value for biodiversity. Evaluating how the management of road verges affects wildlife, both directly and indirectly, provides opportunities to integrate biodiversity into urban planning, design, and management. We studied butterf...

Rapid climate change and ongoing habitat destruction pose a serious threat to global biodiversity. Understanding how species shift their geographical distributions in response to climate change is important for planning conservation actions for the biodiversity of isolated islands like Sri Lanka. Here, we used Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) modeling to p...

Human activities are accelerating biodiversity loss, necessitating tools capable of monitoring biodiversity patterns over large spatial and temporal scales. Passive acoustic monitoring methods, including acoustic indices, are emerging as a promising approach for surveying vocalizing animals. Numerous studies have assessed the effectiveness of acous...

Preserving biodiversity requires an understanding of how natural environments and anthropogenic factors shape the global distribution of biological diversity. Moving beyond a focus on endangered species, conservation needs to also preserve the typical interactions among species that structure communities, such as those found in mixed‐species bird f...

Background Understanding how landscape characteristics affect animal movement is essential for conservation in human-dominated habitats. A fundamental question is how monoculture agroforests, including rubber and tea plantations, affect wildlife and its movement. Experimental translocations represent an important technique to assess animals’ habita...

This new version of the bibliography, first compiled in 2010 only for terrestrial mixed-species bird flocks, has been expanded to include both mixed-species moving groups, and stationary associations such as mixed-species aggregations or colonies. There are now separate pages for terrestrial bird forest flocks, mobbing aggregations, waterbirds, mam...

The need for remote, reliable, and scalable monitoring of plummeting biodiversity amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems and changing climate has sparked enormous interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) over multiple disciplines and ecosystems. Even though PAM could support UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity I...

Visual mimicry is less understood in birds than in other taxa. The interspecific social dominance mimicry (ISDM) hypothesis asserts that subordinate species resemble dominant ones to reduce aggression. Plumage mimicry has also been consistently noted in mixed-species flocks (MSFs), suggesting a connection to grouping behaviour, although it is uncle...

Biodiversity loss is a global concern. Current technological advances allow the development of novel tools that can monitor biodiversity remotely with minimal disturbance. One example is passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), which involves recording the soundscape of an area using autonomous recording units, and processing these data using acoustic in...

The analysis of audio recordings through acoustic indices has been proposed as an efficient way to measure and monitor biodiversity, given the assumption that higher levels of biodiversity produce more rapidly-changing and complex sound. However, in previous work in south China, we have found only moderate correlations between the acoustic indices...

Agricultural intensification not only increases food production but also drives widespread biodiversity decline. Increasing landscape heterogeneity has been suggested to increase biodiversity across habitats, while increasing crop heterogeneity may support biodiversity within agroecosystems. These spatial heterogeneity effects can be partitioned in...

Secondary forests are increasingly important for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem functioning. Yet, we know little on how species interactions shift across the wide range of life history strategies in the context of forest succession, especially for non‐trophic animal social systems. Using data from mixed‐species flocks (hereafter MSFs) and...

The increasing biodiversity loss worldwide has resulted in a growing need for cost-effective, efficient tools to monitor biodiversity over large spatial and temporal scales. The idea of using acoustic indices to monitor soniferous animal communities is becoming increasingly popular. Dozens of indices have been proposed over the last 15 years to mea...

Interspecific information flow is known to affect individual fitness, population dynamics and community assembly, but there has been less study of how species diversity affects information flow and thereby ecosystem functioning and services. We address this question by first examining differences among species in the sensitivity, accuracy, transmis...

Human threats to biodiversity are prevalent within protected areas (PAs), undermining their effectiveness in halting biodiversity loss. Certain threats tend to co-occur, resulting in amplified cumulative impact through synergistic effects. However, it remains unclear which threats are related the most. We analyzed a dataset of 71 human threats in 1...

The biodiversity impacts of agricultural deforestation vary widely across regions. Previous efforts to explain this variation have focused exclusively on the landscape features and management regimes of agricultural systems, neglecting the potentially critical role of ecological filtering in shaping deforestation tolerance of extant species assembl...

Aim: Island biogeography theory has been extended to include various species in- teractions, but has yet to consider intraguild mutualisms. We compare species-area relationships for mixed-species flocks to those for the entire bird community and de- termine how ‘nuclear’ species, those important to flock formation or cohesion, which often have func...

Research on the coexistence of congeneric species is essential for understanding community assemblages. Smaller competitors are expected to avoid larger ones, either spatially or temporally, to reduce interspecific competition. According to the spatial scaling law, the greater the difference in body size, the weaker the competitive interactions of...

The model of allopatric speciation in an island biogeographic framework suggests that the division of ancestral mainland populations lead to two or more allopatric island species through natural or sexual selection, or through genetic drift. Climatic conditions can influence the process of speciation by creating physical barriers that prevent gene...

Urbanization has dramatically altered Earth's landscapes and changed a multitude of environmental factors. This has resulted in intense land-use change, and adverse consequences such as the urban heat island effect (UHI), noise pollution, and artificial light at night (ALAN). However, there is a lack of research on the combined effects of these env...

Human-induced climate and land-use change impact species’ habitats and survival ability. A growing body of research uses species distribution models (SDMs) to predict potential changes in species ranges under global change. We constructed SDMs for 411 Chinese endemic vertebrates using Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) modeling and four shared socioeconomic...

Mobbing is a prevalent anti-predatory behaviour in birds where prey actively engage in harassing predators. Functional traits have been shown to affect prey species' tendency to engage in mobbing, but empirical studies have largely neglected to assess the influence of some other potentially important functional traits, such as intraspecific and int...

Agricultural lands have been increasingly reported to be contaminated by metals and metalloids, leading to exposure to these toxins for humans and wildlife. Previous studies on metal/metalloid contamination have reported biomagnification of total elemental Hg (THg) and, less consistently, of Cd, in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Whether o...

Island biogeography theory has proved a robust approach to predicting island biodiversity on the assumption of species equivalency. However, species differ in their grouping behaviour and are entangled by complex interactions in island communities, such as competition and mutualism. We here investigated whether intra- and/or interspecific sociality...

One of the most fundamental goals of modern biology is to achieve a deep understanding of the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. It has been observed that in some mixed-species animal societies, there appears to be a drive towards some degree of phenotypic trait matching, such as similar coloration or patterning. Here we build on these observa...

Mixed-species groups of birds, fishes and mammals have traditionally been described in taxa-specific journals. However, mixed-species systems are actually more widely found when one includes aggregative (non-moving) systems, such as those common in amphibians and invertebrates. The objective of this special issue is to dispel the idea that mixed-sp...

Agricultural lands have been increasingly reported to be contaminated by metals and metalloids, leading to exposure to these toxins for humans and wildlife. Previous studies on metal/metalloid contamination have reported biomagnification of total elemental Hg (THg) and, less consistently, of Cd, in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Whether o...

Contact calling is a ubiquitous behavior of group-living animals. Yet in birds, beyond a general connection with group cohesion, its precise function is not well-understood, nor is it clear what stimulates changes in contact call rate. In an aviary experiment, we asked whether Swinhoe's White-eyes, Zosterops simplex, would regulate their own produc...

Previous studies have recommended preserving semi-natural habitats as a strategy to promote natural enemies and reduce the abundance of agricultural pests. Such non-crop habitats, however, may increase pest abundance, causing spillover from non-crop to crop fields. A potentially more economical and attractive solution for farmers might arise if cro...

The variation in climatic conditions over space and time is considered a major driving force in speciation. Gloger's rule is one such rule that broadly explains the variation in the colouration of endotherms (birds and mammals) with the effects of climatic parameters. This predicts that endothermic animals tend to have darker colouration in warm an...

Apportioning the sources of metals/metalloids is a critical step toward soil quality protection and ecological restoration. The objective of this study was to identify the potential sources of contamination of As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Mn, Pb, and Zn, and determine the contribution rates of each source, to rice and sugarcane agroecosystems of southwester...

Understanding how non-trophic social systems respond to environmental gradients is still a challenge in animal ecology, particularly in comparing changes in species composition to changes in interspecific interactions. Here, we combined long-term monitoring of mixed-species bird flocks, data on participating species' evolutionary history and traits...

Participants in mixed-species bird flocks (MSFs) have been shown to associate with species that are similar in body size, diet, and evolutionary history, suggesting that facilitation structures these assemblages. In addition, several studies have suggested that species in MSFs resemble each other in their plumage, but this question has not been sys...

Long-term vegetation plots represent one of the largest types of research investments in ecology, but efforts to interrelate data on plants with that on animals is constrained because of the disturbance produced by human observers. Recent advances in the automated identification of animal sounds on large datasets of autonomously collected audio rec...

Begging brings benefits and costs for nestling birds: it can indicate their needs to their parents, but it can also be a cue used by predators to find the nest. The costs, like many variables related to nest predation, can be specific to what kinds of predators are present and their auditory capabilities. These costs and benefits could also be affe...

Birding photograpy is a popular and growing form of ecotourism that contributes to the economic growth of local communities, but its disturbance to bird reproduction remains understudied. We worked in a tropical forest of southern China, which has experienced a sharp increase in the number of photographers in recent years. We compared nests that we...

Aposematic organisms defend themselves through various means to increase their unprofitability to predators which they advertise with conspicuous warning signals. Predators learn to avoid aposematic prey through associative learning that leads to lower predation. However, when these visual signals become unreliable (e.g., through automimicry or Bat...

Multidimensional approaches examining complex trait-niche relationships are crucial to understand community assembly. This is particularly important across habitat transformation gradients because specialists are progressively substituted by generalists and, despite increasing functional homogenization, in both specialist and generalist communities...

As the two largest countries by population, China and India have pervasive effects on the ecosphere. Because of their human population size and long international boundary, they share biodiversity and the threats to it, as well as crops, pests and diseases. We ranked the two countries on a variety of environmental challenges and solutions, illustra...

Background Mixed-species flocks (MSFs) have been well sampled in the South Asia, but there has been as yet surprisingly little work on MSFs of Nepal, despite a diverse and well-studied avifauna. We surveyed MSFs in two forest types in and around the Important Bird Area of Chitwan National Park in Nepal, between 150 and 800 m a.s.l., to provide a fi...

People are now impacting the natural environment at an unparalleled scale. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that up to one million species may be threatened with extinction. Protected areas (PAs) represent a key conservation strategy for addressing human environmental impacts. In 201...

Background Begging brings benefits and costs for nestling birds: it can indicate their needs to their parents, but it can also be a cue used by predators to find the nest. The costs, like many variables related to nest predation, can be specific to what kinds of predators are present and their auditory capabilities. These costs and benefits could a...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.777175/full Asia is a land of contrasts. This is the largest and most populated region of the world, it is where urbanization is increasing at the highest rate (Seto et al., 2012). At the same time, it is extremely biodiverse (Myers et al., 2000), so that promoting harmonious human-wildlife co...

Understanding how landscape characteristics such as matrix composition and configuration affect bird movement is essential for conservation in human-disturbed habitats. An important tool for such studies is experimental translocation, in which birds are removed from their territories, and observed, often using radio telemetry, as to whether they re...

Vocalizations that signal predation risk such as alarm calls provide crucial information for the survival of group-living individuals. However, alarm calling may attract the predator’s attention and, to avoid this cost, animals can opt for alternative strategies to indicate danger, such as ‘adaptive silence’, which is the cessation of vocalizations...

Increasing crop configurational heterogeneity—smaller crop fields with more field margins—has been repeatedly found to support farmland biodiversity. But research on compositional crop heterogeneity—the number and evenness of crop types—has usually shown only weak effects. However, much of this research has been conducted in large‐scale temperate a...

Playback can help identify keystone species in communities that interact behaviourally. Specifically, playback has been used to identify leader species in mixed-species flocks (MSFs) of birds, although it is not clear whether responding heterospecifics are attracted to the leader species or the whole MSF. Playback can also simulate a mobbing respon...

Aposematic organisms defend themselves through various means to increase their unprofitability to predators which they advertise with conspicuous warning signals. Predators learn to avoid aposematic prey through associative learning that leads to lower predation. However, when these visual signals become unreliable (e.g., through automimicry or Bat...

An emerging method of monitoring biodiversity is through the use of audio recordings, often made by autonomous recording units. Acoustic indices have been developed to estimate animal diversity, especially across human disturbance gradients, and have been shown to often correlate with manual counts of animals. Less work has examined whether acousti...

The conversion of rainforests into agriculture resulted in massive changes in species diversity and community structure. Although the conservation of the remaining rainforests is of utmost importance, identifying and creating a biodiversity‐friendly agriculture landscape is vital for preserving biodiversity and their functions. Biodiversity studies...

Protected areas (PAs) represent one of our most important conservation strategies for halting biodiversity loss. The number of PAs has increased remarkably over the last few decades. Yet, biodiversity is still being lost at alarming rates, even within many of those PAs. Understanding the factors that influence the levels of human pressure within PA...

Mercury (Hg) is a neurotoxic element with severe effects on humans and wildlife. Widely distributed by atmospheric deposition, it can also be localized near point sources such as mines. Mercury has been shown to reduce the reproduction of bird populations in field observations in North America and Europe, but studies are needed in Asia, where the m...

Encouraging crop diversity could be a “win–win” for farmers and biodiversity conservation, if having a variety of crops produces the heterogeneity that supports biodiversity, and if multiple crops decrease the risk of farmers to losses due to pests, climatic events or market fluctuations, without strongly reducing their incomes. However, data on th...

Bradfer-Lawrence et al. (2020) have used a novel modeling approach to analyze acoustic indices, working with well-replicated data from autonomous recorders, and linking the indices to the sites’ mean avian richness rather than to simultaneous bird surveys. Their findings represent an important contribution to the literature on acoustic indices. We...

Conservation and/or environmental non-governmental organizations (CE-NGOs) have recently been scrutinized about their leadership's human diversity. Increasing diversity is an ethical obligation for CE-NGOs, and could benefit them by strengthening their problem solving, fundraising, and interactions with local communities across the world. Providing...

Abstract: Conservation and/or environmental non-governmental organizations (CE-NGOs) have recently been scrutinized about their leadership’s human diversity. Increasing diversity is an ethical obligation for CE-NGOs, and could benefit them by strengthening their problem solving, fundraising, and interactions with local communities across the world....

Although the contact calls of birds have been studied for their acoustic properties, limited research has investigated their repetitive nature. The rate of contact calls could be related to movement, with recruiting birds signaling their location, or it could help maintaining spacing between group mates, or give information about the environment wh...

Although eco-compensation policies have been used with great success in many aspects of ecological restoration in China, previous policies have not shown strong increases in habitat for biodiversity. At the same time, agricultural expansion and urbanization has contributed to the rapid decline of wetlands in the country, as well as their associated...

Species in transformed habitats, frequently labeled as environmental generalists, tend to show broader niches than species in natural habitats. However, how population niche expansion translates into changes in the niches of individual organisms remains unclear, particularly in the context of habitat transformation. Niche expansion could be a produ...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies protected areas into six categories, ranging from strict nature reserves to areas where multiple human uses are permitted. In the past, many researchers have questioned the effectiveness of multiple-use areas, fueling an unresolved debate regarding their conservation value. The li...

A single adverse environment event can threaten the survival of small‐ranged species while random fluctuations in population size increase the extinction risk of less‐abundant species. The abundance–range‐size relationship (ARR) is usually positive, which means that smaller‐ranged species are often of low abundance and might face both problems simu...

In the last 50 years, intensive agriculture has replaced large tracts of rainforests. Such changes in land use are driving niche-based ecological processes that determine local community assembly. However, little is known about the relative importance of these anthropogenic niche-based processes, in comparison to climatic niche-based processes and...

Hypotheses about the mechanisms of community assembly suggest that biotic and abiotic filters constrain species establishment through selection on their functional traits. It is unclear how differences in traits influence the niche dimensions of closely related bird species when they coexist in spatiotemporally heterogeneous environments. Further,...

Animals acquire information produced by other species to reduce uncertainty and avoid predators. Mixed‐species flocks (MSFs) of birds are ubiquitous in forest ecosystems and structured, in part, around interspecific information transfer, with “nuclear” species providing information that other species eavesdrop on. We hypothesized that in a seasonal...

Only dominant individuals have unrestricted access to contested resources in group-living animals. in birds, subordinates with restricted access to resources may respond to intragroup contests by acquiring extra body reserves to avoid periods of food shortage. In turn, higher body mass reduces agility and increases predation and mortality risk to s...

Mixed-species animal groups (MSGs) are widely acknowledged to increase predator avoidance and foraging efficiency, among other benefits, and thereby increase participants' fitness. Diversity in MSG composition ranges from two to 70 species of very similar or completely different phenotypes. Yet consistency in organization is also observable in that...

Mercury pollution is a global problem and of particular concern in high emissions areas, such as China. We studied the migratory Kentish Plover, Charadrius alexandrinus, which breeds in coastal northern/central China and the inland Qinghai Lake, and the White-faced Plover C. dealbatus, a year-round resident of coastal southern China. We measured to...

Heavy metal pollution is widespread in China, particularly in its mining regions. Mercury [Hg] concentrations in birds from Guizhou Province were recently reported to be above adverse effect levels, even in non‐mining areas. We sampled birds to investigate whether Hg might be a threat near lead [Pb], zinc [Zn] and tin [Sn] mines in Guangxi Zhuang A...

Avian mixed-species flocks (MSFs) are an important example of species interactions threatened by the biodiversity crisis. They are found throughout the world in forested habitats but are generally reduced in size or frequency by human disturbance. In southern China, a unique MSF system is led by several species of closely- related fulvettas (Alcipp...

Nest predation is the main reason for breeding failure of small passerines. Theory states that predation in the incubation stage should be mostly due to predators finding poor-quality sites, whereas predation in the nestling stage may be driven by parental activity. Yet field evidence for this theory is mixed, and there are few studies from tropica...

A majority of urban avian research has concentrated on urbanization intensity and vegetation characteristics. However, other built-up and non-built-up characteristics that can represent environmental gradients within a city are less considered, especially in subtropical/tropical cities of Asia. During 2015–2016, we examined how intra-urban environm...

Information on the geographic distribution of a species is fundamental for its conservation. Nonggang Babbler Stachyris nonggangensis (NB) is a rare and newly discovered species that is restricted to limestone karst forest on the Sino-Vietnamese border and has been classified as ‘Vulnerable’ due to its narrow distribution. However, the extent of th...

The field of predator eavesdropping concentrates on the detection by a predator or parasite of signals that prey direct at conspecifics, and the subsequent evolution by prey to avoid or lessen such detection. Here, we first point out that signaling prey species are often found in mixed-species moving groups or stationary aggregations, and ask the q...

Human‐mediated habitat transformation is increasingly evident around the world. Yet, how this transformation influences species’ niche width and overlap remains unclear. On the one hand, human‐mediated habitat transformation promotes increased species similarity through trait‐based filtering, and an increased prevalence of generalist species with b...

Few reports of the relationship exist between mercury (Hg) and selenium (Se) from locations of severe Hg contamination in terrestrial environments. Here, we report the concentrations of Hg and Se as well as Se:Hg molar ratios in biotic samples collected from a region with a long history of Hg mining. Nitrogen isotopes (δ¹⁵N) were analyzed to confir...

Fig trees provide important resources to tropical animals, but is their keystone role affected by human disturbance? In Sri Lanka, we found that more bird species were found in close association with fruiting figs in urban areas, suggesting their role is accentuated there, and justifying their planting.

Animals can use other prey species to learn about the presence of predators and reduce their risk of predation. Species living in the same area can eavesdrop on other species’ alarm signals or cues. Animals may also temporarily join other species to mob predators, or may associate more stably with other species in mixed-species groups, in which com...

The pace-of-life hypothesis predicts no impact of urbanization on stress responses. Accordingly, several studies have been inconsistent in showing differences in breath rate (BR), a proxy of acute stress responses to handling in passerines, between rural and urban areas. However, this evidence is limited to a single bird species and a lim- ited geo...

In agricultural landscapes, the positive role of environmental heterogeneity for biodiversity conservation is often assumed. However, with agricultural intensification, opportunities to maintain or restore semi-natural/natural features that produce environmental heterogeneity may be limited. In such a situation, crop heterogeneity could be a way to...