Klaus Henle

• Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research

Background Within the scope of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC), the ADVANCE project – Advanced metadata standards for biodiversity survey and monitoring data: supporting of research and conservation – aimed at supporting rich metadata generation with interoperable metadata standards and semantic artefacts that facilitate data access, int...

Aim: Squamate fitness is affected by body temperature, which in turn is influenced by environmental temperatures and, in many species, by exposure to solar radiation. The biophysical drivers of body temperature have been widely studied, but we lack an integrative synthesis of actual body temperatures experienced in the field, and their relationship...

Within the scope of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, the ADVANCE project – Advanced metadata standards for biodiversity survey and monitoring data: supporting of research and conservation – aimed at supporting rich metadata generation with interoperable metadata standards and semantic artifacts that facilitate data access, integration and reus...

Increasing agricultural intensification, combined with land transformation and fragmentation, poses significant threats to biodiversity. While extensively cultivated landscapes serve as vital refuges against biodiversity loss, they are modified by land abandonment and intensification. Orchard meadows in Central Europe represent traditional extensiv...

Citizen scientists play an increasingly important role in biodiversity monitoring. Most of the data, however, are unstructured—collected by diverse methods that are not documented with the data. Insufficient understanding of the data collection processes presents a major barrier to the use of citizen science data in biodiversity research. We develo...

Comparative studies of mortality in the wild are necessary to understand the evolution of aging; yet, ectothermic tetrapods are underrepresented in this comparative landscape, despite their suitability for testing evolutionary hypotheses. We present a study of aging rates and longevity across wild tetrapod ectotherms, using data from 107 population...

Caecilians (Gymnophiona) are commonly known as limbless amphibians and are the least understood vertebrate order. In this paper, we documented skin color, eye, jaw, snout, tentacular aperture and cloacal anomalies in 12 individuals of four species belonging to the three caecilian genera Ichthyophis, Uraeotyphlus and Gegeneophis collected from hots...

As the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and floods have increased over recent decades, more extreme biological responses are being reported, and there is widespread interest in attributing such responses to anthropogenic climate change. However, the formal detection and attribution of biological responses to cli...

Abbaustätten der mineralischen Baurohstoffe (Steine und Erden) haben in der gegenwärti-gen Kulturlandschaft eine herausragende Bedeutung für den Erhalt störungsgebundener Lebensgemeinschaften. Eine Reihe von Reptilien- und Amphibienarten der Fauna-Flora-Habitat-Richtlinie und weitere spezialisierte Arten finden in Tagebauen (z. B. Kies-, Sand-, Leh...

With the increase in wind turbines, bird collisions have developed as a potential hazard. In the federal state of Brandenburg, Germany, despite the on-going mitigation efforts of increasing the distances of wind turbines from the breeding areas of the more severely affected populations of red kites (Milvus milvus), the additional detrimental influe...

We explored the feasibility of using reptile species richness as an indicator of ecological integrity in semi-arid woodlands in Southern Australia. We compared the options available for calculating the observed (O) and expected (E) values with the methods and approaches used for estimating and mapping ecological integrity in rivers. We concluded th...

The literature on anomalies from natural populations of amphibians is enormous but widely dispersed and difficult to access. To fill the gap I compiled a global database that covers all extant and fossil amphibian species for which anomalies have been reported. The database focuses on externally visible anomalies. The database is an EXCEL file that...

Biodiversity-related impacts at wind energy facilities have increasingly become a cause of conservation concern, central issue being the collision of birds. Utilizing spatial information of their carcass detections at wind turbines (WTs), we quantified the detections in relation to the metric distances of the respective turbines to different land-u...

Systematic conservation initiatives attempt to cater to the needs of many species via the integration of multiple species distribution models (SDMs), or via the integration of Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) software, such as Zonation. Unfortunately, due to limited data and knowledge, it is often difficult to select the most suitable model f...

Temporary emigration is widespread in animals and plants and has important implications for ecological processes, evolution and the conservation of species. It is increasingly studied with capture–mark–recapture (CMR) models. Temporary emigration provides particular challenges to CMR analyses if it involves movement to an unobservable state. A mult...

To allow comparison of observations an unequivocal definition of terms is essential. While early scholars of amphibian anomalies already introduced specific terms and provided extensive definitions, some of these terms have changed their meaning over time, some are no longer used and others have been replaced more recently with alternative terms by...

Behavioral thermoregulation is an important mechanism allowing ectotherms to respond to thermal variations. Its efficiency might become imperative for securing activity budgets under future climate change. For diurnal lizards, thermal microhabitat variability appears to be of high importance, especially in hot deserts where vegetation is highly sca...

The conservation of amphibians is of increasing relevance due to their ongoing and rapid decline. Alterations of floodplains are a major contributor to these declines in temperate Europe. In this study, we assessed the factors determining the abundance of four anuran species (Rana arvalis, Pelobates fuscus, Bombina bombina and Hyla arborea) in a dy...

List of bird species captured in 72 plots of the Ducke Forest Reserve in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Taxonomy and systematic order follow the IOC World Bird List (v 7.1). (PDF)

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on environmental predictors. The colors indicate the three environmental groups identified by K-means partitioning. The closer the points are the more similar plots are in terms of their environmental variables. (PDF)

Summary of environmental predictors (mean ± standard deviation, minimum and maximum) for eastern and western watersheds at Ducke Forest Reserve. Data obtained from ppbio.inpa.gov.br/repositorio/dados on 03/26/2015). (PDF)

PERMANOVA pairwise results. Effects of ‘Environmental group’ and ‘Year’ on bird assemblage structure. (PDF)

Results of DISTLM sequential tests within sets of predictors. Cumulative proportion of variation (R2) in bird assemblage structure that is explained by fitting variables within sets sequentially using forward selection, and conditional tests using 9999 permutations of residuals under a reduced model. Values in bold indicate P < 0.10. (PDF)

Correlation of bird species with environmental groups. CAP ordination of bird data (based on m = 13 PCO axes) maximizing differences among the three a priori environmental groups, showing vector overlay of Pearson correlations of individual bird species with CAP axes (restricted to those having lengths > 0.25). (PDF)

Distribution of bird species in relation to watersheds in the Ducke Forest Reserve. Bars represent the presence of each species in a given plot. Orange bars are plots located in the eastern watershed (n = 34) while green bars represent plots located in the western watershed (n = 38). (PDF)

Results of analyses using “Common forest understorey species” dataset. Analyses were based on 64 bird species. (PDF)

Distribution of bird species over the years in the Ducke Forest Reserve. Bars represent the presence of each species in a given plot. Pale blue dots represent 2012; green dots represent 2013 and dark blue dots represent 2014. (PDF)

In order to study the population genetic structure of the Amazonian understorey bird Glyphorynchus spirurus, we have isolated eight polymorphic microsatellite loci using next-generation sequencing. All loci were screened using 40 samples from central Amazonia. The number of alleles varied from five to 22. The observed heterozygosities ranged from 0...

Amphibian anomalies have attracted human curiosity for centuries and the literature on this issue is very extensive. The vast majority of publications on natural populations refer to less than ten affected individuals. Recent observations of mass anomalies in amphibians and increased environmental awareness reignited the interest in amphibian anoma...

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009;...

This plot is not part of the published stance but derives from it. The plot shows the number of authors by geographic region (courtesy of Dr. Diego Astua).

We agree with Brook and Bradshaw (2015) that pragmatic decisions on future energy mixes should be made without prejudice. They assessed different techniques for electricity generation based on a selected number of criteria. Using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), they concluded that nuclear energy ranked particularly well relative to costs...

Ethics committees that are required to oversee research activities involving the capture and handling of wild animals tend to take a cautious attitude because little has been published that quantifies their effects on animals. However, to address questions in ecology and evolution, it is often essential to be able to identify individual animals. To...

The protection of biodiversity is a complex societal, political and ultimately practical imperative of current global society. The imperative builds upon scientific knowledge on human dependence on the life-support systems of the Earth. This paper aims at introducing main types of uncertainty inherent in biodiversity science, policy and management,...

Tropical forests have an important role in the global carbon cycle, as they store a large amount of carbon (C). Tropical forest deforestation has been identified as a major source of CO2 emissions, though biomass loss due to fragmentation – by creating forest edges – has been largely overlooked as an additional CO2 source. Here, through the combina...

Background / Purpose: We present a genomic comparison of the Anoles carolinensis to the next generation sequencing (NGS) data of the Lacerta viridis . Both were expected to diverge around 60-80 Mya, and differ in terms of the number of chromosomes and nature of sex-chromosomes. They are both from the order Squamata but from different suborders i....

The concept of green infrastructure has been recently taken up by the European Commissionfor ensuring the provision of ecosystem services (ESS). It aims at the supply of multiple ESS in a given landscape, however, the effects of a full suite of management options on multiple ESS and landscape multifunctionality have rarely been assessed. In this pa...

There is increasing concern about the global decline of amphibians and reptiles. One problem with documenting declines and identifying underlying causes is the absence of historical data to compare to current data. Here we provide historic data for Kioloa on the south-eastern coast of New South Wales. In this region considerable clearing of natural...

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is now known to be a proximate cause of amphibian declines on five continents. Bd infects more than 500 species of amphibians and infections in wild amphibians are reported for 54/81 countries for which data are available (http://www.bd-maps.net/surveillance/). At its worst, emergence of Bd leads to a 70% loss of...

Angesichts des rasanten Wandels unserer Umwelt und des drohenden Verlusts ökosystemarer Dienstleistungen sind aussagekräftige Daten zum Zustand und der Entwicklung der biologischen Vielfalt von großer Bedeutung. Um diese für Deutschland zu generieren, erscheint eine Anpassung und Koordination bestehender Monitoringprogramme dringend notwendig. Hier...

In the light of rapid global change and the impending loss of ecosystem services, informative data on the state and trends of biological diversity are vital. Generating these data in Germany requires modifications to and better coordination among the existing monitoring programmes. To this end, closer cooperation between scientific institutions, ex...

Abstract Background: Floodplains are among the most diverse, dynamic, productive and populated but also the most threatened ecosystems on Earth. Threats are mainly related to human activities that alter the landscape and disrupt fluvial processes to obtain benefits related to multiple ecosystem services (ESS). Floodplain management therefore requir...

Population viability analyses (PVAs) contribute to conservation theory, policy, and management. Most PVAs focus on single species within a given landscape and address a specific problem. This specificity often is reflected in the organization of published PVA descriptions. Many lack structure, making them difficult to understand, assess, repeat, or...

The book presents a structured procedure covering ecological and legal, economic, and social aspects of the wildlife conflicts. This book is about conflicts between different stakeholder groups triggered by protected species that compete with humans for natural resources. It presents key ecological features of typical conflict species and mitigati...

An overview is given about the history of a conflict-laden relationship between Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra) and humans in Saxony for more than 100 years. The development of the conflict is described in front of the background of otter persecution, population development, social and economical factors as well as legal instruments in four historica...

The shared use of natural resources by humans and wildlife is the basis of long-lasting conflicts whose reconciliation is an urgent need. To fully understand the degree of damage and the conflict intensity, detailed knowledge is required on the distribution and abundance of animals and thus their visiting rate and contact with vulnerable resources,...

Conflicts arising from the competition of humans and wildlife for biological resources are as old as humankind. Changes in civil society’s attitudes towards wildlife and the success of conservation management have resulted in wildlife prospering again and returning to areas from where they had disappeared and even spreading to new habitats. This is...

One way to mitigate conflicts between species protection and economic damage is population management, i.e. active control of the target species. Any strategy of population control, however, has to meet the constraint that the population stays viable. This chapter presents a framework for modelling and monitoring the viability of populations under...

Data on the diet of an aquatic top predator are essential to assess the impact of predation on the fisheries resources. Quantitative data are sparse however. Field data is usually collected by analysis of undigested parts in the food remains of scats, pellets, or in stomach and intestine of dead animals. Advanced techniques as fatty acid or stable-...

The development of effective environmental management plans and policies requires a sound understanding of the driving forces involved in shaping and altering the structure and function of ecosystems. However, driving forces, especially anthropogenic ones, are defined and operate at multiple administrative levels, which do not always match ecologic...

Wildlife captures the imagination of humans. The image of wildlife and human-wildlife conflicts differs among people. Therefore, it is essential in a book that addresses human-wildlife conflicts to first clarify what we understand by “wildlife” and “human-wildlife conflicts”. In the broadest sense, all wild, undomesticated animals and plants belong...

Attempts to reconcile human-wildlife conflicts are usually developed on a case-by-case approach. A generic framework can offer help in the reconciliation of such conflicts by building on common elements and the experience gained in case studies. Here we introduce the concept and structure of such a generic framework that is based on the experience...

Auen bieten dem Menschen eine bemerkenswerte Vielfalt von Funktionen und Leistungen. In dieser Veröffentlichung wird der Beitrag von Fluss auen zur Hochwasserretention, zum Rückhalt von Nährstoffen und Treibhausgasen sowie ihre Bedeutung für die biologische Vielfalt erfasst und in Wert gesetzt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf die Auen von 79 Flüs...

We review the natural occurrence of tail duplications and tail bifurcations in amphibians as well as experimental studies that induced tail duplications. For natural populations, we found 10 publications that mention tail duplications or bifurcations in a total of 24 individual larval amphibians belonging to 15 species, mainly from Europe and South...

Floodplains are characterized by high spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Despite low active mobility, Central European floodplain gastropod communities show a high species diversity. They are supposed to have developed a large range of resistance and/or resilience strategies to survive in the highly variable and frequently disturbed floodplain hab...

The effective population size (N(e)) is proportional to the loss of genetic diversity and the rate of inbreeding, and its accurate estimation is crucial for the monitoring of small populations. Here, we integrate temporal studies of the gecko Oedura reticulata, to compare genetic and demographic estimators of N(e). Because geckos have overlapping g...

The assessment of the impacts of growing genetically modified (GM) crops remains a major political and scientific challenge in Europe. Concerns have been raised by the evidence of adverse and unexpected environmental effects and differing opinions on the outcomes of environmental risk assessments (ERA). The current regulatory system is hampered by...

One of the core challenges of biodiversity conservation is to better understand the interconnectedness and interactions of scales in ecological and governance processes. These interrelationships constitute not only a complex analytical challenge but they also open up a channel for deliberative discussions and knowledge exchange between and among va...

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The individual identification of animals is crucial for the estimation of population size, animal density and other ecological investig ations. If species are rare and cryptic or difficult to catch and observe, non invasive techniques are preferred. But genetic analyses can be very expensive if used at a landscape scale. Therefore a combination of...

Populations of the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) were tremendously depleted in Central Europe since the end of the 19th century. As a consequence, populations in Germany decreased heavily and in Western Germany otters even disappeared. This led to a gap in distribution that disconnects Eastern and Western European populations. But, since the 1990s o...

Habitat models for animal species are important tools in conservation planning. We assessed the need to consider several scales in a case study for three amphibian and two grasshopper species in the post-mining landscapes near Leipzig (Germany). The two species groups were selected because habitat analyses for grasshoppers are usually conducted on...

Colour change is a well-known phenomenon in many amphibians. Most of these changes involve transient darkening, lightening, or attainment of breeding colours. Nuptial calosities may become lighter outside the main breeding season. Depigmentation as an extreme form of lightening has been documented also for keratinized structures of tadpole mouths....

Biodiversity conservation measures and biological processes often do not match in scale The EU funded project SCALES (Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales) is intended to solve this challenge SCALES analyses how selected pressures (climate change, habitat loss, fragmenta...

Bromeliads are a conspicuous component of tropical forests. Whereas several amphibian species are closely associated with bromeliads, reptiles are much less frequently observed in bromeliads and only a few species use bromeliads for egg deposition or as roost site. We report on an adult Urostrophus vautieri that was sleeping in a water-filled brome...

Wetlands perform functions that deliver benefits to society, often referred to as ecosystem services. These ecosystem services include water supply, flood regulation, water purification, climate regulation, biodiversity, agriculture (e.g. grazing land), and amenity. A functional approach to wetland assessment enables a holistic view to be taken of...

We studied the spatial activity of a small population of the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra Linnaeus, 1758) in a landscape with eight groups of ponds, which comprise roughly 100 km², by synchronous repeated collecting of faeces or secretions. The duration of the study was five consecutive days. The daily sum of fresh faeces found within the study area...

1. Visitation rate is a measure of the frequency with which animals visit specific locations of interest. This information is crucial for various problems in the conservation and management of animal species, e.g. to determine the risk wildlife poses to human managed resources or the predation risks of nests. An important assessment tool, especiall...

Mosaic cycles were originally understood as cyclical regeneration phases in forests. In this review, we shall examine how far the concept can be extended towards cyclical mosaics of habitat quality in patterned landscapes as a special case of ‘dynamic landscapes’. We will concentrate on habitats and plants in European temperate agricultural landsca...

There is much public concern about threats to global biodiversity. Industrial pollution, changes in agricultural practices and climate change, are all having a direct impact on biodiversity. In this book the Editors provide a broad view of the many pressures imposed by human-induced changes and the many threats to global biodiversity and of the pol...

Faeces have proved to be a suitable non-invasive DNA source for microsatellite analysis in wildlife research. For the success of such studies it is essential to obtain the highest possible PCR amplification success rate. These rates are still relatively low in most carnivorous species, especially in the otter (Lutra lutra). We therefore optimised t...

The use of species data versus environmental surrogates used in lieu of species data in systematic reserve site selection is still highly debated. We analyse in a case study whether and how the results of reserve network selection are affected by the use of species data versus habitat surrogates (habitat models) for qualitative (presence/absence) a...

The common lizard (Lacerta vivipara) is a small, nonterritorial, live-bearing lacertid that is sexually dimorphic in several morphological traits (e.g., tail length, snout-vent length, head size). Using microsatellites, we examined paternity in a wild population and investigated whether sexual dimorphism could be the result of intra- or intersexual...

With the aim of creating a simplified sampling scheme that would retain the accuracy of standard mark–release–recapture (MRR) sampling, but at a greatly reduced cost, we analysed 23 capture–recapture data sets from spatially closed populations of six Lepidoptera species according to the constrained Cormack–Jolly–Seber models. Subsequently the relat...

In this paper, circumstances where various human activities and interests clash with the conservation of forest biodiversity are examined, with particular focus on the drivers behind the conflicts. After identifying past and current human-related threats potentially leading to conflicts in forests, the paper will focus on conflict management and mo...

We summarise the contributions of empiricists, modellers, and practitioners in this issue of Biodiversity and Conservation, and highlight the most important areas for future research on species survival in fragmented landscapes. Under the theme uncertainty in research and management, we highlight five areas for future research. First, we know littl...

We present a brief introduction to current attempts to understand and mitigate the effects of fragmentation on species survival. We provide a short overview of the contributions of empiricists, modellers, and practitioners in this issue of Biodiversity and Conservation, which were initiated during a workshop held in Australia in February 2002 on th...