Mairi Elspeth Knight

• PhD
• University of Plymouth

Vespa velutina is an Asian bee-hawking hornet that has rapidly colonised continental Europe since its accidental introduction in 2004. Its range continues to expand with the first confirmed sightings in Guernsey in 2017. This study aimed to analyse local weather variables over three years to assess their importance for predicting Asian hornet occur...

The Western honey bee, Apis mellifera (A. mellifera) Linnaeus, is one of the world’s most economically important pollinators. Conserving genetic resources in this species is therefore of significant value. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the potential erosion of locally adapted genetic variants by transhumance of particular subspeci...

Simple Summary The human management of honey bees (Apis mellifera) has led to a reduction in the range and integrity of native subspecies, as they are replaced by foreign subspecies with traits that are perceived to be more desirable. Introgression—the transfer of alleles (gene variants) between genetically distinct lineages via hybridisation and r...

Within the theoretical framework of the small population paradigm, we investigated the population genomics and parasite load of two bumblebee species across the UK and Ireland. Bombus pratorum is widespread and common throughout its range while Bombus monticola is restricted to higher altitudes and shows a more fragmented distribution. Bombus monti...

Post-mining restoration of heathland habitats has met with mixed success. Failures are often ascribed to the complexity of replicating soil conditions: a scarcity of organic matter and microbial symbionts in stored overburden used for restoration is frequently implicated. Nonetheless, systematic investigation of the role of both interventions is la...

Termites are vital parts of the soil biota in tropical regions, but their spatial ecology is barely studied. Here, termites were surveyed in two one‐hectare plots, to investigate spatial patterns of soil‐dwelling termites in old growth rainforest. Ecological interactions tested were as follows: (1) environmental relationships; (2) termite feeding g...

Recent research has shown drastic reductions in the global diversity and abundance of insects. This is a major concern given the expected cascade effects on ecosystem services, such as pollination. Understanding the patterns and drivers of changes in the distribution and abundance of species in our rapidly changing environment is therefore urgent....

Ranaviruses are emerging pathogens that can cause morbidity, mortality and population declines in ectothermic hosts; however, there is no standardized approach to diagnostics. Here, we compared the inter-assay variation and intra-assay precision among 2 commonly used quantitative PCRs (qPCRs), a conventional and a nested PCR assay (used as a gold s...

Atlantic lowland heath (ALH) is a priority conservation habitat in Western Europe, but restoration efforts have met with mixed success due to the complexity associated with replicating establishment conditions. By virtue of their impoverished, often acidic soils and geographic location in areas naturally occupied by ALH communities, former kaolinit...

Hybridisation and introgression can have negative impacts on regional biodiversity through the potential erosion of locally adapted lineages. The honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) occurs in twenty-seven subspecies across Europe, is an extremely economically important insect, yet threatened by multifarious impacts. Transhumance of the most commercially...

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is a pathogen killing amphibians worldwide. Its impact across much of Asia is poorly characterized. This study systematically surveyed amphibians for Bd across rocky plateaus in the northern section of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, India, including the first surveys of the plateaus in the coastal region...

S1 Supplementary material for: Thorpe et al. 2018. Climate structuring of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis infection in the threatened amphibians of the northern Western Ghats, India Journal manuscript number: RSOS-170810

The importance of patch quality for amphibians is frequently overlooked in distribution models. Here we demonstrate that it is highly important for the persistence of endemic and endangered amphibians found in the threatened and fragile ecosystems that are the rocky plateaus in Western Maharashtra, India. These plateaus are ferricretes of laterite...

Breakdown of abundance data by taxa, site, eco-zone, year and day-night time survey. (DOCX)

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Land-use change and intensification threaten bee populations worldwide, imperilling pollination services. Global models are needed to better characterise, project, and mitigate bees' responses to these human impacts. The available data are, however, geographically and taxonomically unrepresentative; most data are from North America and Western Euro...

p>Land-use change and intensification threaten bee populations worldwide, imperilling pollination services. Global models are needed to better characterise, project, and mitigate bees' responses to these human impacts. The available data are, however, geographically and taxonomically unrepresentative; most data are from North America and Western Eu...

Bumblebees are ecologically and economically important, and some species have suffered dramatic population declines. The absence of morphological diagnostic characters for the identification of some species creates difficulties for basic ecological studies, and for conservation management. The widespread and commercially exploited bumblebee subgenu...

Aim Demographic linkage between subpopulations plays a critical role in population processes. Metapopulation dynamics, however, remains one of the most poorly understood aspects of population biology. This is especially true for small, pelagic seabirds because their discrete subpopulations are located on offshore islands, separated by vast areas of...

Aim Current estimates of species richness within rapidly evolving species flocks are often highly dependent on the species status of allopatric populations that differ in phenotypic traits. These traits may be unreliable indicators of biological species status and systematists may have inconsistently assigned species among lineages or locations on...

The Bombus sensu stricto species complex is a widespread group of cryptic bumblebee species which are important pollinators of many crops and wild plants. These cryptic species have, until now, largely been grouped together in ecological studies, and so little is known about their individual colony densities, foraging ranges or habitat requirements...

Summary of Spearmans rank correlations between compositional landscape variables describing landscapes within a 700 m radius from the focal oilseed rape field. Top panel = Test statistic (S) and p value. Lower panel = Rho correlation co-efficient. P-values in bold with a * are significant after Bonferroni corrections for multiple tests (p<0.006). M...

Final generalized linear models describing the effects of landscape composition variables on proportions and colony density estimates of each species, simplified from a full model which included: area of arable land, forestry, mass flowering crops, artificial surfaces and length of field boundary. Model fit is calculated as follows: ((null deviance...

Full results of multiple comparisons of variables from generalized linear models investigating the effects of landscape composition variables on proportions and colony densities of each species. Proportion estimates are on the logit scale, and colony density estimates are on the on log scale. Model fit is calculated as follows: ((null deviance – re...

Summary of landscapes variables calculated surrounding each of the 14 fields. (DOC)

Colony density estimations for a) Bombus terrestris, b) B. lucorum, c) B. cryptarum and d) B. lapidarius at each site. Nind = number of individual worker bees sampled, Nsis = total number of sister pairs found within the sampled individuals using COLONY analyses of microsatellite data, and in the oilseed rape field only (OS), adjacent field only (A...

Assessing genetic variation underlying ecologically important traits is increasingly of interest and importance in population and conservation genetics. For some groups generally useful markers exist for examining the relative role of selection and drift in shaping genetic diversity e.g. the major histocompatibility complex in vertebrates and self-...

In response to on-going biodiversity loss, conservation genetics has established itself as an important branch of biology. Historically concentrating on assessing stochastic processes using neutral loci, there has been a recent surge of interest in understanding and quantifying variation at loci underlying ecologically important traits. To this end...

Sexual segregation in foraging and migratory behaviour is widespread among sexually dimorphic marine vertebrates. It has also been described for a number of monomorphic species, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We examined variation among years, seasons and age-classes in sex-specific foraging and over-wintering behaviour in the...

The great green bush-cricket, Tettigonia viridissima, is at the northern limits of its geographic distribution in the UK and has suffered a significant reduction in population abundance and range over the last 50 years, now being largely confined to the southern UK. This study uses five characters to investigate differences between UK and mainland...

Dramatic local population decline brought about by anthropogenic-driven change is an increasingly common threat to biodiversity. Seabird life history traits make them particularly vulnerable to such change; therefore, understanding population connectivity and dispersal dynamics is vital for successful management. Our study used a 357-base pair mito...

Click beetle larvae (wireworms) are significant crop pests in Europe and North America. In Canada, there are ~30 economically important species which are morphologically difficult to identify, but for which sequence data are lacking. Accurate knowledge of damage-causing species and the population genetics and phylogeography of elaterids will provid...