Nunzio Knerr

Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research · CSIRO National Facilities and Collections

Banksia L.f., an iconic genus of the Proteaceae, is endemic to Australia, with its highest species richness and phylogenetic diversity (PD) in southwestern Western Australia. Analysis of the phylogenetic component of richness and endemism uncovered important patterns of Banksia evolutionary history that are not seen at the species level. We found t...

Aim The goal of this study was to investigate the invasion history of the weed Sonchus oleraceus in Australia by comparing the population genetic structure of individuals at different locations in Australia, and in the most likely areas of origin in the native range. Location Samples were collected in Europe and Morocco, North Africa (27 locations...

Australia’s 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires burnt more than 8 million hectares of vegetation across the south-east of the continent, an event unprecedented in the last 200 years. Here we report the impacts of these fires on vascular plant species and communities. Using a map of the fires generated from remotely sensed hotspot data we show that,...

Restoring degraded landscapes has primarily focused on re‐establishing native plant communities. However, little is known with respect to the diversity and distribution of most key revegetation species or the environmental and anthropogenic factors that may affect their demography and genetic structure. In this study, we investigated the genetic st...

An important new hypothesis in landscape ecology is that extreme, decade-scale megadroughts can be potent drivers of rapid, macroscale ecosystem degradation and collapse. If true, an increase in such events under climate change could have devastating consequences for global biodiversity. However, because few megadroughts have occurred in the modern...

Aim In recent years biogeography has been transformed by the increased availability of large‐scale distributional data, phylogenies, and novel quantitative analysis methods and models. More case studies, however, are needed to test the performance of various approaches, in particular at global scales and in species‐rich groups. In this study, we in...

Aim Biodiversity is declining rapidly at a global scale, fuelling the need for urgent conservation action. With limited resources available, areas for conservation often need to be prioritized. Phylo‐diversity metrics such as phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic endemism (PE) combine phylogenies and spatial distribution data and can be used...

Climate change is challenging many species which are expected to respond through range shifts, in situ adaptation or extinction. Successful plant migration is complex and dependent on many factors including propagule availability, dispersal ability, regeneration sensitivity and habitat suitability. Eucalypts are a common and key component of the Au...

AimsThe Proteaceae are a diverse family of approximately 80 genera and 1700 species with a mostly southern-hemisphere distribution. While distributional patterns of various subsets of the Proteaceae have been studied, no quantitative continental-scale study of species-level spatial biodiversity patterns of the Australian Proteaceae has been conduct...

ContextLandscape-scale conservation planning is key to the protection of biodiversity globally. Central to this approach is the development of multifunctional rural landscapes (MRLs) that maintain the viability of natural ecosystems and promote animal and plant dispersal alongside agricultural land uses. Objectives We investigate evidence that non-...

Eucalypts cover most of Australia. Here, we investigate the relative contribution of climate and geochemistry to the distribution and diversity of eucalypts. Using geostatistics, we estimate major element concentrations, pH, and electrical conductivity at sites where eucalypts have been recorded. We compare the median predicted geochemistry and rep...

Bioregions are an important concept in biogeography, and are key to our understanding of biodiversity patterns across the world. The use of networks in biogeography to produce bioregions is a relatively novel approach that has been proposed to improve upon current methods. However, it remains unclear if they may be used in place of current methods...

Predicting the consequences of climate change for biodiversity is critical to conservation efforts. Extensive range losses have been predicted for thousands of individual species, but less is known about how climate change might impact whole clades and landscape-scale patterns of biodiversity. Here, we show that climate change scenarios imply signi...

Aim: Biodiversity studies typically use species, or more recently phylogenetic diversity (PD), as their analysis unit and produce a single map of observed diversity. However, observed biodiversity is not necessarily an indicator of significant biodiversity and therefore should not be used alone. By applying a small number of additional metrics to P...

Understanding changes of biodiversity across the landscape underlies biogeography and ecology and is important in land management and conservation. Measures of species and phylogenetic turnover used to estimate the rate of change of assemblages between sets of locations are more often influenced by wide‐ranging taxa. Transition zones between region...

Identifying geographical areas with the greatest representation of the tree of life is an important goal for the management and conservation of biodiversity. While there are methods available for using a single phylogenetic tree to assess spatial patterns of biodiversity, there has been limited exploration of how separate phylogenies from multiple...

Appendix S1. Phylogenies for each taxa (maximum likelihood RAxML).

Appendix S3. Examples of meta‐analysis as a PDF with R scripts and instructions to run the basic calculations.

Appendix S4. Examples of meta‐analysis as an .rmd format to create a PDF or word document.

Appendix S6. Data subsets including acaciaex_grid.csv, fish_grid.csv, fishex_grid.csv, frogsex_grid.csv, plantgenex_grid.csv, knitbutton.png, pd_pairs_all.csv, pe_pairs_all.csv,sr_pairs_all.csv, we_pairs_all.csv, mdb.dbf, mdb.sbn, mdb.sbx, mdb.shp and mdb.shx.

Appendix S2. Comparison of the diversity patters using the mean for all grid cells analyses (upper panels) when fish data were excluded (lower panels) and the mean for concordant.

Appendix S5. Helper functions as an R script.

Because ferns have a wide range of habitat preferences and are widely distributed, they are an ideal group for understanding how diversity is distributed. Here we examine fern diversity on a broad-scale using standard and corrected richness measures as well as phylogenetic indices; in addition we determine the environmental predictors of each diver...

AimTo explore the performance of phylogenetic diversity metrics and of the novel categorical analysis of neo- and palaeo-endemism (CANAPE) using a dataset of Australian native Asteraceae and in particular to compare the results at two taxonomic ranks: genus and species.LocationAustralia.Methods We used specimen data from Australia's Virtual Herbari...

Bryophytes are significant contributors to floristic diversity, but they are often neglected in field surveys and collections. Thus, in order to obtain more accurate estimates of plant richness, there must be reliable estimates of bryophyte diversity. To address this, we examined whether another plant group, namely the ferns, could be used as a sur...

Understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity is critical for conservation planning, particularly given rapid habitat loss and human-induced climatic change. Diversity and endemism are typically assessed by comparing species ranges across regions. However, investigation of patterns of species diversity alone misses out on the full richness of patt...

The largest digitized dataset of land plant distributions in Australia assembled to date (750,741 georeferenced herbarium records; 6,043 species) was used to partition the Australian continent into phytogeographical regions. We used a set of six widely distributed vascular plant groups and three non-vascular plant groups which together occur in a v...

Aim To map spatial patterns of species richness, species endemism and species turnover of the eucalypts; to propose a biogeographical regionalization of eucalypts based on species turnover; and to identify the environmental correlates of these patterns. Location Australia and M alesia. Methods We analysed 798 eucalypt species ( A ngophora, C orym...

Northern Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia all boast unique endemic rainforest and savanna flora, but also share a large number and diversity of common plant taxa. The knowledge and understanding of these floras and their evolutionary histories has to date been largely compiled through morphological comparisons. Advances in molecular ph...

Aim To develop a biogeographical regionalization of Australian A cacia species and to investigate their environmental correlates. Location A ustralia. Methods We used a previously published framework for delineating biogeographical regions. We calculated species turnover patterns of 1020 A ustralian A cacia species with distributions estimated fr...

Biological collections are increasingly becoming databased and available for novel types of study. A possible limitation of these data, which has the potential to confound analyses based on them, is their biased composition due to non-random and opportunistic collecting efforts. While geographic biases are comparatively well studied and understood,...

Aim Our aims were (1) to compare observed, estimated and predicted patterns of species richness using the Australian native Asteraceae as an example, (2) to identify candidates for hotspots of diversity for the study group, and (3) to examine the distortion of our perception of the spatial distribution of species richness through uneven or misdirec...

Mapping diversity hotspots of key species, such as the crop wild relatives, is an essential task for their conservation and for their further exploration. In this paper, we develop and apply methods to locate centres of species richness (SR), endemism, phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic endemism (PE) for the Australian perennial diploid specie...

Although understanding the patterns of diversity is essential for conservation and environmental studies, an understanding of bryophyte distributions in Australia has been limited by the absence of continental-scale maps for patterns of bryophyte diversity. The aim of this study was to identify the patterns of species richness and endemism of hornw...