Junhua Hu

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Chengdu Institute of Biology

Background Climatic and geographic variations have profound effects on the resource utilization of individuals and populations. Evaluating resource use in different environments is crucial for understanding species ecological adaptation strategies and promoting biodiversity conservation. Stable isotopes are widely used to assess trophic niches, pro...

Understanding the effect of environmental factors on population characteristics of amphibians is crucial for their conservation and management. This is especially pertinent in regions vulnerable to climate change, such as the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP). Here, we investigated the underlying environmental factors affecting the occurrence and abund...

Livestock grazing has occurred on the Qinghai–Xizang Plateau for thousands of years, profoundly influencing the material cycle and energy flow in local ecosystems. However, the effects of grazing on plateau wetlands, specifically regarding trophic niches, remain poorly understood because of the lack of studies on indicator taxa. Amphibians are vuln...

Considering the increased anthropogenic impacts, species with a limited range and low detectability often lack fundamental information and conservation actions, placing them at a high risk of endangerment. The Chinting alpine toad Scutiger chintingensis is a rare mountain amphibian endemic to the eastern margin of the Qinghai–Xizang Plateau in Chin...

Aim Mountain systems harbour disproportionate biodiversity on Earth. However, the mechanism underlying community assembly along elevational gradients remains unclear due to the complexity of environmental constraints and biotic interactions. Birds play a crucial role in mountain system and are sensitive to environmental changes, making them an idea...

The plateau environments are typically arid, cool, and high altitude, posing formidable challenges to wildlife survival due to resource scarcity and harsh conditions. Unraveling ecological adaptability in severe conditions requires a deeper understanding of the niche characteristics of plateau species. Trophic niche, which is a comprehensive indica...

An assessment of animal roadkill can help develop road mitigation measures. This article is the first to report data on animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs) in Nanjing, a supercity in eastern China. The research was conducted on a 224.27 km stretch of nine roads in Nanjing. In the period, between November 2020 and October 2021, 26 fortnightly monitorin...

Background Predicting invasiveness requires an understanding of the propensity of a given species to thrive in areas with novel ecological challenges. Evaluation of realized niche shift of an invasive species in its invasive range, detecting the main drivers of the realized niche shift, and predicting the potential distribution of the species can p...

The Taihangshan swelled-vented frog (Feirana taihangnica), an endemic species to the Qinling Mountains, central China, has experienced a dramatic population decline over the last few decades. The aim of this work was to quantify morphological variation in F. taihangnica across the Qinling Mountains and examine environmental correlates of this varia...

Aim Mountain systems offer excellent opportunities to understand β‐diversity patterns and the processes driving them. However, β‐diversity patterns and the underlying mechanisms that lead to dissimilarity in mountain amphibian communities across elevational gradients remain elusive. We aimed to evaluate how amphibian communities respond to environm...

Unraveling geographical modes of speciation processes has been a longstanding topic in biogeography. Divergence can be driven by factors operating on multiple spatial scales, such as geographical distance (isolation by distance, IBD), landscape resistance (isolation by resistance, IBR) and environmental heterogeneity (isolation by environment, IBE)...

Amphibians on Mount Emei

Background: Predicting invasiveness requires understanding the propensity of a given species to thrive in areas with novel ecological challenges. The Australian redback spider, Latrodectus hasselti, a widow spider native to Australia and established in Japan, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. We hypothesized that human impact is important for succes...

Acting as a cornerstone in conserving biodiversity, protected areas (PAs) have played important roles in protecting the unique flora and fauna in China, yet a variety of issues have arisen, such as fragmented management, dispersed spatial pattern, and conflicts with socioeconomic development. To grapple with the problems associated with the current...

Combining morphological and molecular data, we describe a new amphibian species of the genus Kurixalus Ye, Fei, & Dubois, 1999 from the Qionglai Mountain within the western margin of the Sichuan Basin in China. Kurixalus qionglaiensis sp. nov. can be diagnosed based on a combination of the following morphological characters: medium-sized within gen...

Background Spatial variation of land cover can result in the changes of community similarities and biotic homogenization, whereby the increasing similarity would reduce the adaptive capacity of biotic assemblages to further disturbance, and degenerate ecosystem services they offer. However, it remains scarce to integrate multidimensional diversity...

Mountain systems harbor an evolutionarily unique and exceptionally rich biodiversity, especially for amphibians. However, the associated elevational gradients and underlying mechanisms of amphibian diversity in most mountain systems remain poorly understood. Here, we explored amphibian phylogenetic and functional diversity along a 2 600 m elevation...

Several anurans have broad elevational and latitudinal distribution ranges; distinct species and populations may face various environmental and selection stresses. Due to their environmental sensitivity, adaptation is critical for the long-term persistence of anurans. Previous studies have tried to identify the ecogeographical pattern and its mecha...

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...

Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to climate changes that are expected to cause habitat fragmentation and loss and, ultimately, local extirpations. However, little is known about how the interaction between climate change and fragmentation may impede the ability of amphibians to adapt to climate change. Here, we used the iconic mountain frog Q...

The studies of climatic-niche shifts over evolutionary time accompanied by key morphological innovations have attracted the interest of many researchers recently. We applied ecological niche models (ENMs), ordination method (environment principal component analyses; PCA-env), combined phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs), and phylogenetic genera...

For many migrant bird species around the world, climate change has been shown to induce changes in the timings of arrival and the onset of spring food availability at breeding sites. However, whether such changes enlarged asynchrony between the timings of spring arrival of long-distance migratory birds and onset of vegetation greenness increase rem...

The observed patterns and underlying mechanisms of elevational beta-diversity have been explored intensively, but multi-dimensional comparative studies remain scarce. Herein, across distinct beta-diversity components, dimensions and species groups, we designed a multi-faceted comparative framework aiming to reveal the general rules in the observed...

Background Understanding the impacts of past and contemporary climate change on biodiversity is critical for effective conservation. Amphibians have weak dispersal abilities, putting them at risk of habitat fragmentation and loss. Both climate change and anthropogenic disturbances exacerbate these risks, increasing the likelihood of additional amph...

The studies of climatic-niche shifts over evolutionary time accompanied by key morphological innovations have attracted the interest of many researchers recently. We analyzed the realized niche dynamics across clades within Scutiger boulengeri using ecological niche models (ENMs), ordination method (environment principal component analysis; PCA-env...

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 advent of the phylogenomic era has significantly improved our understanding of the evolutionary history and biogeography of Southeast Asia’s diverse avian fauna. However, the taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships of many Southeast Asian birds remain poorly resolved, especially for those with large geographic ranges, which might have experienc...

Understanding the diversity, distribution, and threat status of species serves an important role in biodiversity conservation, particularly in regions with high species richness. Being a well-known Natural and Cultural World Heritage site, Mount Emei is seated on the transition zone between Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and Sichuan Basin in southwestern...

The advent of the phylogenomic era has significantly improved our understanding of the evolutionary history and biogeography of Southeast Asia’s diverse avian fauna. However, the taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships of many Southeast Asian birds remain poorly resolved, especially for those with large geographically range, which might have experi...

Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) is common feature of natural communities and has gained increasing attention due to its significant ecological effects on community dynamics and ecosystem functioning. However, the estimation of ITV per se has yet to receive much attention, despite the need for accurate ITV estimation for trait-based ecological i...

Understanding how ecological processes affect phenotypic evolution has been and continues to be an important goal of ecology and evolutionary biology. Interspecific competition for resources can be a selective force driving phenotypic differentiation that reduces competition among sympatric species (character divergence), enabling closely related s...

Background Speciation with gene flow is an alternative to the nascence of new taxa in strict allopatric separation. Indeed, many taxa have parapatric distributions at present. It is often unclear if these are secondary contacts, e.g. caused by past glaciation cycles or the manifestation of speciation with gene flow, which hampers our understanding...

Problems of the human-animal relationship in China are associated with imperfect legal protection. Few recent studies in English have focused on the entire legislation framework for wildlife protection, or paid sufficient attention to revision of the Wildlife Protection Law of China. This study aims to provide a review of the legislation pertinent...

Understanding how environmental stress modifies life-history traits of vertebrates is highly important for their conservation and management. Amphibians, in particular, have experienced rapid declines in abundance due to their relatively low mobility and strict physiological constraints. Therefore, it is important to understand how amphibians have...

Mountains, representing storehouses of biodiversity, endemism and threatened species, are biodiversity hotspots of great conservation importance. However, increasing evidence indicates that mountain species throughout the world are responding to climate change, past or contemporary, by shifting their geographic distributions and patterns of genetic...

Quaternary climatic oscillations and geography are of primary importance in shaping intraspecific genetic diversity. We examined the diversification patterns and inferred processes for the green odorous frog (Odorrana margaretae) of western China. Species distribution modeling showed that the species has a continuous circular distribution around th...

Speciation with gene flow is an alternative to the nascence of new taxa in strict allopatric separation. Indeed, many taxa have parapatric distributions at present. It is often unclear if these are secondary contacts, e.g. caused by past glaciation cycles or the manifestation of speciation with gene flow, which hampers our understanding of how diff...

The effects of Quaternary climatic oscillations on the distributions of organisms in different parts of the world are not equally well understood, limiting the ability to understand the determinants of biodiversity. Compared with the mountain regions in southern Europe and southwestern North America, such effects on high‐elevation species in the Ea...

The Three-River-Source (TRS) region, which harbors an evolutionarily unique and impressively large portion of plateau biodiversity, is an important national ecological security shelter zone. Acting as the first system pilot in China, the TRS National Park will be turned into both the exhibition of nature conservation and a heritage area of ecologic...

Background Identifying and understanding the mechanisms that shape barriers to dispersal and resulting biogeographic boundaries has been a longstanding, yet challenging, goal in ecology, evolution and biogeography. Characterized by stable, adjacent ranges, without any intervening physical barriers, and limited, if any, range overlap in a narrow con...

Under the pressure of growing populations and climate change globally, biofuel crops have motivated accelerating interest in the production of renewable bioenergy to provide a substantial proportion of the future energy supply. Both habitat suitability for cultivation and potential aggravating environmental problems from biofuel crops attract conce...

The East Asian–Australasian flyway contains some of the most threatened habitats in the world, with at least 155 waterbird species reliant on the tidal habitats it comprises. The black-faced spoonbill ( Platalea minor ) is an iconic endangered species distributed across the coast of East Asia. Its population suffered a severe decline into the 1990s...

Ecological niche modelling (ENM) is used widely to aid in conservation planning and management, often focusing on rare species characterized by the biased observations associated with restricted geographic ranges, habitat specialization, small population size and limited natural history information. Generating reliable ENMs for such species is a ch...

The role of ecological niche in lineage diversification has been the subject of long-standing interest of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Gynandropaa frogs diversified into three independent clades endemic to the southeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Here, we address the question whether these clades kept the same niche after separation, an...

Aim Montane regions like the Sino‐Himalayas constitute global diversity hotspots. Various mechanisms such as in situ adaptive divergence, speciation following immigration or allopatric diversification in complex landscapes have been proposed to account for the exceptional diversity found in a particular clade in a montane setting. We investigated m...

Variation in body size and sexual size dimorphism (SSD) can have important consequences for animal ecology, behavior, population dynamics and the evolution of life-history traits. Organisms are expected to be larger in colder climate (i.e., Bergmann's rule) and SSD varies with body size (i.e., Rensch's rule). However, the underlying mechanisms are...

Global climate change is known to affect the assembly of ecological communities by altering species' spatial distribution patterns, but little is known about how climate change may affect community assembly by changing species' temporal co-occurrence patterns, which is highly likely given the widely observed phenological shifts associated with clim...

Species of the genus Gynandropaa within the family Dicroglossidae are typical spiny frogs whose taxonomic status has long been in doubt. We used integrative methods, involving morphological and molecular analyses, to elucidate the phylogenetic relationships, and determine identities and geographic distribution of each valid species. We obtained DNA...

Ecological niche divergence and adaptation to new environments are thought to play important roles in driving speciation. Whether recently evolved species show evidence for niche divergence or conservation is vital towards understanding the role of ecology in the process of speciation. The genus Procapra is an ancient, monophyletic lineage endemic...

It remains a challenge to identify the geographical patterns and underlying environmental associations of species with unique ecological niches and distinct behaviors. This in turn hinders our understanding of the ecology as well as effective conservation management of threatened species. The white-eared night heron (Gorsachius magnificus) is a non...

Based on ecological niche theory, ecological niche models (ENMs) apply statistical and machine learning theories to analyze occurrence data and to build character functions that estimate the possible shape of the realized niche of the species within the niche space. In the last two decades, the use of ENMs to predict the potential distribution of s...

Species distribution modeling (SDM) is increasingly used to reveal biogeographical relationships, for example the sympatric range for species coexistence, and fundamental questions about niche evolution between related species. We explored the sympatric ranges between three Procapra species (Procapra przewalskii, Procapra Picticaudata, and Procapra...

Amphibians are good indicators of ecosystem health. Updating the information of endemic species in time and understanding their spatial distributions are necessary for the development of integrative conservation strategies and the elucidation of geographic patterns of amphibians. We analyzed the diversity and distributions of the endemic amphibians...

Wetlands are critical habitats for birds. However, wetlands are being degraded at an accelerating rate due to global human activity, and a disproportionate fraction of wetland-dependent bird species are in decline. We evaluated the conservation value of a new Ramsar site, Guangdong Haifeng Wetlands, China, for birds, by comparing bird communities (...

Global climate change appears to be one of the main threats to biodiversity in the near future and is already affecting the distribution of many species. Currently threatened species are a special concern while the extent to which they are sensitive to climate change remains uncertain. Przewalski's gazelle (Procapra przewalskii) is classified as en...