Nussaȉbah B. Raja

Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · Department of Geography and Earth Sciences

Aim The current assessment of extinction risk in reef corals by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been criticized, because coral life‐history traits associated with resilience are not reflected in the conservation status. We aimed to carry out a quantitative assessment of the link between reef coral traits and species ex...

Sampling variations in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, compilations of global fossil occurrences used in these analyses not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical collation of these data. Here, we demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism as well as socio-econ...

Fossil material in Myanmar amber can provide important insights into mid-Cretaceous forest ecosystems, but has been receiving increased international attention due to reported links between amber mining and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in northern Myanmar, as well as the legal issues associated with its exportation. Here, we conduct a bibliometr...

In a world where an increasing number of resources are hidden behind paywalls and monthly subscriptions, it is becoming crucial for the scientific community to invest energy into freely available, community-maintained systems. Open-source software projects offer a solution, with freely available code which users can utilise and modify, under an ope...

Corallite sizes reflect a continuum in the efficacy of photosymbiosis in colonial reef corals, with smaller corallite sizes generally associated with higher autotrophy. Using a large compilation of reef-coral traits and corallite diameters as a proxy, we test here the hypothesis that photosymbiotic efficacy has increased over the evolutionary histo...

Drivers of reef decline are well known both today and in the geological past. Considerably less is known about the preconditions for a pantropical expansion of coral reefs. The geological record of reef building is characterised by considerably long intervals with very limited reef expansion and geologically brief (< 20 million years) episodes of p...

International collaborations show asymmetries and imbalances that influence how countries take part in international relations. In this context, science diplomacy (SD) could offer possibilities towards building partnerships and meaningful engagement between Europe and Latin America. The purpose of this article is to analyse how scientific collabora...

Modern coral reefs are among the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. Accordingly, we hypothesize that past hyperthermal events had lasting impacts on reef coral communities. Specifically, novel communities are expected to emerge after ancient warming events, where novel communities are those that document a rapid and irreversible shift in...

Conservation paleobiology has coalesced over the last two decades since its formal coining, united by the goal of applying geohistorical records to inform the conservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, the field is still attempting to form an identity distinct from its academic roots. Here, we ask a decep...

Paleontology has provided invaluable basic knowledge on the history of life on Earth. The discipline can also provide substantial knowledge to societal challenges such as climate change. The long-term perspective of climate change impacts on natural systems is both a unique selling point and a major obstacle to becoming more pertinent for policy-re...

Debates on the restitution of colonial loot usually focus on art, antiquities, religious artefacts, and similar objects. Many fossils of considerable scientific and cultural value were also removed under colonial rule, yet they rarely feature in these discussions de- spite being classified as cultural objects. This article seeks to shed light on th...

Conservation paleobiology has coalesced over the last two decades since its formal coining, united by the goal of applying geohistorical records to inform the conservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, the field is still attempting to form an identity distinct from its academic roots. Here, we ask a decep...

The fascination with ancient flora and fauna is a centuries-old phenomenon and is one of the main drivers of fossil crimes. Fossils have been sought by the rich and famous since the advent of colonialism, propelling development in the field of palaeontology but also in how fossils make their way through various, sometimes illegal, corridors to end...

The effects of the redistribution of flora and fauna by European empires are still visible in global biodiversity today and can be traced through the distribution of introduced species. Attempts to solve today’s biodiversity crisis necessitates grappling these colonial legacies head on.

Publications are the de facto currency of academia. Academics, palaeontologists included, are judged by publication metrics, which usually include the impact factor of the journal in which they publish, the number of publications, and the number of citations. However, in the race to publish in high-impact journals and the pressure to increase resea...

Fossil material in amber from Myanmar can provide important insights into mid-Cretaceous forest ecosystems. However, Myanmar amber has been receiving increased international attention due to reported links between amber mining and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in northern Myanmar, as well as the legal issues associated with its exportation. Here,...

Morphological traits of reef-building corals can reflect the functions of corals and the functional diversity of entire reefs. For example, corallite diameter and corallite integration have been used to infer photosymbiosis in corals, while the growth form manifests the structural complexity of the reef. A combination of traits may thus be particul...

Fossil occurrence databases are indispensable resources to the palaeontological community, yet present unique data cleaning challenges. Many studies devote significant attention to cleaning fossil occurrence data prior to analysis, but such efforts are typically bespoke and difficult to reproduce. There are also no standardised methods to detect an...

Trait-based approaches are increasingly relevant to understand ecological and evolutionary patterns. A comprehensive trait database for extant reef corals is already available and widely used to reveal vulnerabilities to environmental disturbances including climate change. However, the lack of similar trait compilations for extinct reef builders pr...

Anthropogenic global warming is redistributing marine life and may threaten tropical benthic invertebrates with several potential extinction mechanisms. The net impact of climate change on geographical extinction risk nevertheless remains uncertain. Evidence of widespread climate-driven extinctions and of potentially unidentified mechanisms exists...

This document contains the references for the data sources compiled in the Ancient Reef Traits Database

Resumen gráfico de "Excavando más profundo en las prácticas paleontológicas coloniales en el México y Brasil modernos"

Resumo gráfico de "Aprofundando-se nas práticas colonialistas da paleontologia no México e no Brasil dos dias atuais"

Graphical abstract for "Digging deeper into colonial palaeontological practices in modern day Mexico and Brazil"

Scientific practices stemming from colonialism, whereby middle- and low-income countries supply data for high-income countries and the contributions of local expertise are devalued, are still prevalent today in the field of palaeontology. In response to these unjust practices, countries such as Mexico and Brazil adopted protective laws and regulati...

Traducción completa al castellano del artículo original.

Tradução completa ao português do artigo original.

Versão integral traduzida do artigo "Digging deeper into colonial palaeontological practices in modern day Mexico and Brazil", publicado na revista Royal Society Open Science em março de 2022. Essa versão em Português faz parte do material suplementar do artigo original.

Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FinalDraft_Chapter03.pdf

Sampling biases in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, these biases not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical and current collation of fossil data. We demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth, education and political sta...

To the Editor — The dinosaur fossil ‘Ubirajara jubatus’ was allegedly exported from Brazil in 1995 and is currently held by State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK) in Germany. It has attracted the attention of the scientific community not only because of its intrinsic interest but also for the controversy surrounding its export from Brazil...

This document contains the plain language summaries for the study:Raja, N. B., Dunne, E. M., Matiwane, A., Khan, T. M., Nätscher, P. S., Ghilardi, A. M., and Chattopadhyay, D. (2021). Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity. EarthArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31223/X5802N

This document contains the references for the data sources used in the study: Raja, N. B., Dunne, E. M., Matiwane, A., Khan, T. M., Nätscher, P. S., Ghilardi, A. M., and Chattopadhyay, D. (2021). Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity. EarthArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31223/X5802N

Coral communities today are negatively affected by anthropogenic greenhouse gas release causing global warming and ocean acidification. Natural greenhouse gas release by massive volcanism is thought to have caused one of the Big Five mass extinctions at the end of the Triassic period (200 million years ago). This hyperthermal event triggered one of...

Global warming today is taking its toll on coral reefs globally, particularly affecting scleractinian corals which rely on their symbionts for nutrition. In the past, hyperthermal events have probably triggered evolutionary losses and gains of symbiosis in corals. Accordingly, we expect photosymbiotic corals to be more strongly affected than non-sy...

Many ecological and evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient, i.e. the increase in species richness from the poles to the tropics. Among the evolutionary hypotheses, the ‘out of the tropics’ (OTT) hypothesis has received considerable attention. The OTT posits that the tropics are both a cradle and sou...

Highlighting different experiences in palaeontology, palaeontologists Nussaïbah Raja-Schoob (Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen–Nuremberg) and Emma Dunne (University of Birmingham) discuss minority languages in academia.

Species traits and spatial distributions influence the extinction risk of species as a result of abiotic and biotic change. We performed a comparative assessment of the relationship between traits and extinction risk of reef corals in the modern oceans against Plio-Pleistocene reef corals. We chose the Plio-Pleistocene as most of the corals during...

Analyses of past global biodiversity are severely hindered by sampling biases and gaps in the fossil record. These have previously been attributed to several geological and biological factors such as rock outcrop area, taxonomic definitions, fossil abundance, among others. In many cases, inferred so-called global diversity curves only reflect regio...

The end-Triassic mass extinction and reef crisis was a significant crisis in the evolution of scleractinian corals. The crisis is thought to have been caused by volcanically induced global warming. Accordingly, we would expect photosymbiotic corals to be more strongly affected than non-symbiotic corals. However, although corallite integration has d...

The region of Artvin, located in the northeast of Turkey, usually experiences high-intensity precipitation events that occur within a short-time period. Along with other environmental impacts, these events also lead to flash floods in this region. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the changing spatial and temporal characteristics of precipi...

Researchers focusing on global-scale ecological and evolutionary patterns are faced with the overwhelmingly increasing volume and diversity of data compilations. The complexity of the relevant research questions necessitates the interconnected use of multiple datasets (the source variables) that are often regularly updated. Finding these data and i...

Palaeontologists often ask identical questions to those asked by ecologists. Despite this, ecology is considered a core discipline of conservation biology, while palaeontologists are rarely consulted in the protection of species, habitats and ecosystems. The recent emergence of conservation palaeobiology presents a big step towards better integrati...

In a world where an increasing number of resources are hidden behind paywalls and monthly subscriptions, it is becoming crucial for the scientific community to invest energy into freely available, community-maintained systems. Open-source software projects offer a solution, with freely available code which users can utilise and modify, under an ope...

In a world where an increasing number of resources are hidden behind paywalls and monthly subscriptions, it is becoming crucial for the scientific community to invest energy into freely available, community-maintained systems. Open-source software projects offer a solution, with freely available code which users can utilise and modify, under an ope...

This poster shows the results of a research project that was executed at the iDiv Summer School 2019. The authors assessed 500 Citizen Science projects reported in an EU inventory and conducted an in-depth analysis of 25 case studies. The study aimed at determining the impact of citizen science projects on the policy cycle.

Several ecological and evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient. Here I test the “out of the tropics” hypothesis, which posits that the tropics are a both a cradle and source of biodiversity. The hypothesis predicts that most species originate in the tropics and then expand their ranges towards temper...

Stony corals and coralline sponges are the dominant metazoan reef builders of the Phanerozoic. Both groups have a very volatile fossil record. Whether this volatility is driven by genuine biological signals or preservation bias is still unclear. This, however, imposes severe problems for reconstructing biodiversity dynamics over geological time sca...

The relatively low turnover rates of scleractinian corals in the fossil record are in stark contrast to the high level of extinction risk of modern reef corals as inferred from IUCN Red List. Several spatial and life-history traits are thought to influence coral extinction risk and have been shown to correspond well with IUCN Red List categorizatio...

This study researched the precipitation variability across 53 meteorological stations in Mauritius and different subregions of the island, over a 30-year study period (1981–2010). Time series was investigated for each 5-year interval and also for the whole study period. Non-parametric Mann–Kendall and Spearman’s rho statistical tests were used to d...

George William Mallory Harrison gave a 15 minute talk giving evidence that bivalves and brachiopods largely passed as ships in the night when bivalves adopted infaunal lifestyles in the Mesozoic Marine Revolution but were direct competitors before that point. He won the Best Talk Award of the Macroecology 2019 conference for this talk.

The aim of this study is to quantify the regional precipitation patterns of Mauritius using total mean annual precipitation of 52 meteorological stations for the period 1981–2010. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was first used to determine the significant variables influencing precipitation in Mauritius. A Cluster Analysis (CA) was then applied...

Several ecological and evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient. The “out of the tropics” hypothesis posits the tropics as a cradle of biodiversity, with most clades originating in the tropics and then expanding their ranges towards temperate regions through dispersal. This study analyses the diversit...

Turkey, containing three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, is a hub for genetic biodiversity. However, the vegetation cover has drastically changed in recent decades as a result of substantial transformations in land-use practices. A map of the potential natural vegetation can be used to represent the biodiversity of a country, and therefore a...

The urban airshed of Turkey is under the influence of both traffic and heating emissions. Periodic monitoring and management of air pollution is a must for an up-to-date exposure assessment for effective health and environmental management. The main objective of this paper is to assess the spatial and temporal variability of particulate matter (PM1...

The article “Landslide susceptibility mapping of the Sera River Basin using logistic regression model,” written by Nussaïbah B. Raja, Ihsan Çiçek, Necla Türkoğlu, Olgu Aydin, and Akiyuki Kawasaki, was originally published Online First without open access.

This study examines Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the purpose of flash flood modelling. Cities on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Turkey usually receive heavy rainfall during autumn and winter as a result of cyclogenesis during this period. The most recent flash flood to have occurred in this region was in the city of Bodrum, located...

The purpose of this study is to revaluate the changing spatial and temporal trends of precipitation in Turkey. Turkey is located in one of the regions at greatest risk from the potential effects of climate change. Since the 1970s, a decreasing trend in annual precipitation has been observed, in addition to an increasing number of precipitation-rela...

Of the natural hazards in Turkey, landslides are the second most devastating in terms of socio-economic losses, with the majority of landslides occurring in the Eastern Black Sea Region. The aim of this study is to use a statistical approach to carry out a landslide susceptibility assessment in one area at great risk from landslides: the Sera River...

Yağış, mekânsal ve zamansal ölçekte büyük değişkenlik gösteren en önemli iklim parametrelerinden biridir. Yağışın doğru bir biçimde modellenmesi, hidrolojik çalışmalar, kuraklık ve sel gibi olayların tahmin edilmesi, yerüstü ve yeraltı su kaynakları miktarının tahmini, su kaynaklarının kirlenmesi ile ilişkili pek çok araştırmanın en önemli bölümünü...

Turkey is often victim of floods as a result of intense and prolonged storms usually convective or cyclonic in origin, especially in the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of the country. In this region, the distribution and quantity of rainfall is influenced by Mediterranean cyclones, especially in late autumn and early winter. Combined with the effe...

Precipitation is one of the most important climatic parameters displaying significant changes across space and time. The accurate modeling of precipitation has become an important part of climate research for hydrological studies, the forecast of events such as droughts and floods and the estimation of ground and surface water resources. For this r...