
Lucas N JoppaMicrosoft · Computational Ecology and Environmental Science
Lucas N Joppa
PhD
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (93)
Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for
areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
Learning from the rapidly growing body of scientific articles is constrained by human bandwidth. Existing methods in machine learning have been developed to extract knowledge from human language and may automate this process. Here, we apply sentiment analysis, a type of natural language processing, to facilitate a literature review in reintroductio...
Advancing technology represents an unprecedented opportunity to enhance our capacity to conserve the Earth's biodiversity. However, this great potential is failing to materialize and rarely endures. We contend that unleashing the power of technology for conservation requires an internationally coordinated strategy that connects the conservation com...
Innovation has the potential to enable conservation science and practice to keep pace with the escalating threats to global biodiversity, but this potential will only be realized if such innovations are designed and developed to fulfill specific needs and solve well‐defined conservation problems. We propose that business‐world strategies for assess...
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species includes assessment of extinction risk for 98 512 species, plus documentation of their range, habitat, elevation, and other factors. These range, habitat and elevation data can be matched with terrestrial land cover and elevation datasets to map the species' ar...
Systematic conservation planning and Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are the two most widely used approaches for identifying important sites for biodiversity. However, there is limited advice for conservation policy makers and practitioners on when and how they should be combined. Here we provide such guidance, using insights from the recently develo...
AimTo determine whether extinction risk assessments based on biological collections and using Criterion B of the IUCN Red List Criteria reflect in part an accurate measure of species rarity and thus extinction risk. LocationMadagascar. Methods
We calculate the extent of occurrence (EOO) and area of occupancy (AOO) for orchids using herbarium specim...
Reducing rates of biodiversity loss and achieving environmental goals requires an understanding of what is threatening biodiversity, where and how fast the threats are changing in type and intensity, and appropriate actions needed to avert them. One might expect that the Information Age – typified by a deluge of data resulting from massive and wide...
Extent of Occurrence (EOO) is a key metric in assessing extinction risk using the IUCN Red List categories and criteria. However, the way in which EOO is estimated from maps of species' distributions is inconsistent between assessments of different species, and between major taxonomic groups. It is often estimated from the area of mapped distributi...
Natural and managed ecosystems provide food, water, and other valuable services to human societies. Unnoticed by many in the scientific community, the values associated with ecosystem services have been integrated into U.S. government policy. A recent administration memo ([ 1 ][1]) put U.S. federal
To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, governments have set strategic objectives and have adopted indicators to monitor progress towards their achievement. Projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity of different policy decisions allows decision makers to understand if and how these targets can be met. We projected trends in two widel...
One contribution of 16 to a theme issue 'Measuring the difference made by protected areas: methods, applications and implications for policy and practice'. Several global strategies for protected area (PA) expansion have been proposed to achieve the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi target 11 as a means to stem biodiversity loss, as requir...
Information age technology has the potential to change the game for conservation by continuously monitoring the pulse of the natural world. Whether or not it will depends on the ability of the conservation sector to build a community of practice, come together to define key technology challenges and work with a wide variety of partners to create, i...
Technologies to identify individual animals, follow their movements, identify and locate animal and plant species, and assess the status of their habitats remotely have become better, faster, and cheaper as threats to the survival of species are increasing. New technologies alone do not save species, and new data create new problems. For example, i...
World governments have committed to increase the global protected areas coverage by 2020, but the effectiveness of this commitment for protecting biodiversity depends on where new protected areas are located. Threshold-based and complementarity-based approaches have been independently used to identify important sites for biodiversity. Here we bring...
How multiple types of non-trophic interactions map onto trophic networks in real communities remains largely unknown. We present the first effort, to our knowledge, describing a comprehensive ecological network that includes all known trophic and diverse non-trophic links among .100 coexisting species for the marine rocky intertidal community of th...
Statistical models often use observational data to predict phenomena; however, interpreting model terms to understand their influence can be problematic. This issue poses a challenge in species conservation where setting priorities requires estimating influences of potential stressors using observational data. We present a novel approach for inferr...
Land use change around protected areas can diminish their conservation value, making it important to predict future land use changes nearby. Our goal was to evaluate future land use changes around protected areas of different types in the United States under different socioeconomic scenarios. We analyzed econometric-based projections of future land...
How many flowering plant species are there? Where are they? How many are going extinct, and how fast are they doing so? Interesting in themselves, these are questions at the heart of modern conservation biology. Determining the answers will dictate where and how successfully conservation efforts will be allocated. Plants form a large taxonomic samp...
AimSoftware use is ubiquitous in the species distribution modelling (SDM) domain; nearly every scientist working on SDM either uses or develops specialist SDM software; however, little is formally known about the prevalence or preference of one software over another. We seek to provide, for the first time, a ‘snapshot’ of SDM users, the methods the...
Governments have committed to conserving ≥17% of terrestrial and ≥10% of marine environments globally, especially “areas of particular importance for biodiversity” through “ecologically representative” Protected Area (PA) systems or other “area-based conservation measures,” while individual countries have committed to conserve 3–50% of their land a...
Systematic conservation planning optimizes trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and human activities by accounting for socioeconomic costs while aiming to achieve prescribed conservation objectives. However, the most cost-efficient conservation plan can be very dissimilar to any other plan achieving the set of conservation objectives. This...
A new mode of development for Earth system models is needed to enable better targeted and more informative projections for both decision makers and scientists. A key step toward this is to enable models to be built that include much more robust estimates of uncertainty, which in turn guides where scientific and computational resources need to be di...
A key measure of humanity's global impact is by how much it has increased species extinction rates. Familiar statements are that these are 100-1000 times pre-human or background extinction levels. Estimating recent rates is straightforward, but establishing a background rate for comparison is not. Previous researchers chose an approximate benchmark...
It is widely accepted that the main driver of the observed decline in biological diversity is increasing human pressure on Earth's ecosystems. However, the spatial patterns of change in human pressure and their relation to conservation efforts are less well known. We developed a spatially and temporally explicit map of global change in human pressu...
Biological invasions are a major threat to natural communities worldwide. While several species traits have been identified as important determinants of invasion success, a systematic exploration of the effects of invasions on native communities, and the role of species and community features on community robustness in the face of invasion is lacki...
Aim
Habitat loss continues to cause loss of biodiversity. To quantify the effects of land‐use change on the diversity and composition of ecological communities – in terms of functional groups – we make modelled estimates of the impact of past and future (to 2050) land‐use change on the overall diversity and dietary guild structure of tropical fores...
Background
A principal function of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity.” In December 2013, its second plenary session approved a program to begin a global assessment in 2015. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD...
Protected areas (PAs) are the leading forest conservation policy, so accurate evaluation of future PA impact is critical in conservation planning. Yet by necessity impact evaluations use past data. Here we argue that forward-looking plans should blend such evaluations with anticipation of shifts in threats. Applying improved methods to evaluate pas...
Identifying which areas capture how many species is the first question
in conservation planning. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
aspires to formal protection of at least 17% of the terrestrial world
and, through the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, 60% of plant
species. Are these targets of protecting area and species compatible...
Identifying which areas capture how many species is the first question in conservation planning. The Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) aspires to formal protection of at least 17% of the terrestrial world and, through the Global Strategy for
Plant Conservation, 60% of plant species. Are these targets of protecting area and species compatible...
A central challenge of conservation biology is using limited data to predict rare species occurrence and identify conservation areas that play a disproportionate role in regional persistence. Where species occupy discrete patches in a landscape, such predictions require data about environmental quality of individual patches and the connectivity amo...
Significance
Identifying priority areas for biodiversity is essential for directing conservation resources. We mapped global priority areas using the latest data on mammals, amphibians, and birds at a scale 100 times finer than previous assessments. Priority areas have a higher—but still insufficient—rate of protection than the global average. We i...
"Blind trust" is dangerous when choosing software to support research.
There has been a concerted effort by the international scientific community to understand the multiple causes and patterns of land-cover change to support sustainable land management. Here, we examined biophysical suitability, and a novel integrated index of “Economic Pressure on Land” (EPL) to explain land cover in the year 2000, and estimated the...
Background
Networks of single interaction types, such as plant-pollinator mutualisms, are biodiversity’s “building blocks”. Yet, the structure of mutualistic and antagonistic networks differs, leaving no unified modeling framework across biodiversity’s component pieces.
Methods/Principal Findings
We use a one-dimensional “niche model” to predict a...
Identifying priority areas for biodiversity is essential for directing conservation resources. Fundamentally, we must know where in-dividual species live, which ones are vulnerable, where human actions threaten them, and their levels of protection. As conserva-tion knowledge and threats change, we must reevaluate priorities. We mapped priority area...
Estimates of non-microbial diversity on Earth range from 2 million to over 50 million species, with great uncertainties in numbers of insects, fungi, nematodes, and deep-sea organisms. We summarize estimates for major taxa, the methods used to obtain them, and prospects for further discoveries. Major challenges include frequent synonymy, the diffic...
Estimates of non-microbial diversity on Earth range from 2 million to over 50 million species, with great uncertainties in numbers of insects, fungi, nematodes, and deep-sea organisms. We summarize estimates for major taxa, the methods used to obtain them, and prospects for further discoveries. Major challenges include frequent synonymy, the diffic...
Questions: Are interaction patterns in species interaction networks different from what one expects by chance alone? In particular, are these networks nested – a pattern where resources taken by more specialized consumers form a proper subset of those taken by more generalized consumers? Organisms: Fifty-nine and 42 networks of mutualistic and host...
In their Policy Forum “Paying for ecosystem services—Promise and peril” (4 November 2011, p. [603][1]), A. P. Kinzig and colleagues cite the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report's finding that 60% of the world's ecosystem services have declined over the past 50 years, and declare the
Organisms eating each other are only one of many types of well documented and important interactions among
species. Other such types include habitat modification, predator interference and facilitation. However,
ecological network research has been typically limited to either pure food webs or to networks of only a few
(<3) interaction types. The g...
We delight in Bacher [1xStill not enough taxonomists: reply to Joppa et al. Bacher, S. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2012; 27: 65–66Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (21)See all References[1] sharing our passion for the disarmingly simple, yet significant question: ‘How many species are there?’ By applying our mechanistic model [2xHow man...
Guidelines for submitting commentsPolicy: Comments that contribute to the discussion of the article will be posted within approximately three business days. We do not accept anonymous comments. Please include your email address; the address will not be displayed in the posted comment. Cell Press Editors will screen the comments to ensure that they...
Background/Question/Methods
A simple one-dimensional niche model has been shown to explain the structure of food webs, especially smaller ones. One might also expect a similar approach to explain the structure of antagonistic and mutualistic plant – animal bipartite networks, although nobody has yet tested such a model on these networks. We use a...
For most organisms, the number of described species considerably underestimates how many exist. This is itself a problem and causes secondary complications given present high rates of species extinction. Known numbers of flowering plants form the basis of biodiversity "hotspots"--places where high levels of endemism and habitat loss coincide to pro...
1. Asking whether or not an ecological community displays the structural property of nestedness is becoming increasingly common in ecological research. We note, however, a currently limited understanding of how individual matrix components (e.g. species as rows and sites as columns) and elements (e.g. a species’ occurrence at a site) contribute to...
We estimate the probable number of flowering plants. First, we apply a model that explicitly incorporates taxonomic effort over time to estimate the number of as-yet-unknown species. Second, we ask taxonomic experts their opinions on how many species are likely to be missing, on a family-by-family basis. The results are broadly comparable. We show...
Predicting whether the ranges of tropical species will shift to higher elevations in response to climate change requires models that incorporate data on topography and land use. We incorporated temperature gradients and land-cover data from the current ranges of species in a model of range shifts in response to climate change. We tested four possib...
We investigated the effects of dreissenid mussel (Dreissena polymorpha and D. rostriformis bugensis) invasions on the concentrations of chlorophylla (Chl) and total phosphorus(TP), and the Chl:TP ratio within 27 north-temperate lakes that spanned large gradients in lake size and trophic status, using two approaches: (i) regression analysis and (ii)...
The introduction to this set of papers highlights four challenges to the large-scale analysis of population growth at protected area edges in Africa and Latin America undertaken by George Wittemyer and colleagues in their 2008 paper published in Science. First, it raises questions about their sampling procedures, given national-level variation in s...
Protected areas (PAs) dominate conservation efforts. They will probably play a role in future climate policies too, as global payments may reward local reductions of loss of natural land cover. We estimate the impact of PAs on natural land cover within each of 147 countries by comparing outcomes inside PAs with outcomes outside. We use 'matching' (...
Terrestrial Biomes of Colombia. The 32 terrestrial biomes in Colombia, excluding the insular biomes of the Caribbean and the Pacific [16].
(2.86 MB TIF)
How do national-level actions overlap with global priorities for conservation? Answering this question is especially important in countries with high and unique biological diversity like Colombia. Global biodiversity schemes provide conservation guidance at a large scale, while national governments gazette land for protection based on a combination...
How many species are likely as-yet unknown to science? Even in relatively well-known groups, there may be substantial numbers of such species. It seems likely that these unknown species will be rare and threatened with extinction. Indeed, science may not discover them before they go extinct. We address these issues for a sample of endemic flowering...
Do people migrate toward parks, and if so, why? These long-standing questions in conservation are especially important in tropical regions. It is there that rural human populations intersect with some of the world's greatest biodiversity, and protected areas are often the last line of defense in the fight to slow species extinctions. Detailed case...
Protected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection's impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that "ma...
Global maps of predictors of all categories of protection for elevation, slope, distance to roads, distance to urban areas, agricultural suitability, and species richness. Red indicates that the variable was a significant and positive factor in a regression model explaining protection. Yellow shows a significant and negative association, black indi...
Global maps of predictors of IUCN Category I or II protection within the entire protected area network for a country elevation, slope, distance to roads, distance to urban areas, agricultural suitability, and species richness. Red indicates that the variable was a significant and positive factor in a regression model explaining protection. Yellow s...
About an eighth of the earth's land surface is in protected areas (hereafter "PAs"), most created during the 20(th) century. Natural landscapes are critical for species persistence and PAs can play a major role in conservation and in climate policy. Such contributions may be harder than expected to implement if new PAs are constrained to the same k...