Paula Pappalardo

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)

Quantitatively summarizing results from a collection of primary studies with meta-analysis can help answer ecological questions and identify knowledge gaps. The accuracy of the answers depends on the quality of the meta-analysis. We reviewed the literature assessing the quality of ecological meta-analyses to evaluate current practices and highlight...

On 25 August 2022, the Zoologica Scripta ‐ An International Journal of Systematic Zoology and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters arranged a symposium entitled ‘The role of systematics for understanding ecosystem functions’ in the Academy's premises in Oslo, Norway. The symposium aimed at offering a forum for exploring and discussing tren...

Synthesis research in ecology and environmental science improves understanding, advances theory, identifies research priorities, and supports management strategies by linking data, ideas, and tools. Accelerating environmental challenges increases the need to focus synthesis science on the most pressing questions. To leverage input from the broader...

Species are shifting their distributions in response to climate change. This geographic reshuffling may result in novel co-occurrences among species, which could lead to unseen biotic interactions, including the exchange of parasites between previously isolated hosts. Identifying potential new host–parasite interactions would improve forecasting of...

The performance of DNA metabarcoding approaches for characterizing biodiversity can be influenced by multiple factors. Here, we used morphological assessment of taxa in zooplankton samples to develop a large barcode database and to assess the congruence of taxonomic identification with metabarcoding under different conditions. We analysed taxonomic...

1. Despite the wide application of meta-analysis in ecology, some of the traditional methods used for meta-analysis may not perform well given the type of data characteristic of ecological meta-analyses. 2. We reviewed published meta-analyses on the ecological impacts of global climate change, evaluating the number of replicates used in the primary...

Aim Parasites are a major component of global ecosystems, yet spatial variation in parasite diversity is poorly known, largely because their occurrence data are limited and thus difficult to interpret. Using a recently compiled database of parasite occurrences, we compare different models which we use to infer parasite geographic ranges and parasit...

Abstract Despite strong selective pressure to optimize larval life history in marine environments, there is a wide diversity with regard to developmental mode, size, and time larvae spend in the plankton. In the present study, we assessed if adaptive hypotheses explain the distribution of the larval life history of thoracican barnacles within a str...

Free-living species vary substantially in the extent of their spatial distributions. However, distributions of parasitic species have not been comprehensively compared in this context. We investigated which factors most influence the geographical extent of mammal parasites. Using the Global Mammal Parasite Database we analysed 17 818 individual geo...

Understanding factors that facilitate interspecific pathogen transmission is a central issue for conservation, agriculture, and human health. Past work showed that host phylogenetic relatedness and geographical proximity can increase cross‐species transmission, but further work is needed to examine the importance of host traits, and species interac...

The type of metric and weighting method used in meta-analysis can create bias and alter coverage of confidence intervals when the estimated effect size and its weight are correlated. Here, we investigate bias associated with the common metric, Hedges’d, under conditions common in ecological meta-analyses. We simulated data from experiments, compute...

The distribution of parasites across mammalian hosts is complex and represents a differential ability or opportunity to infect different host species. Here, we take a macroecological approach to investigate factors influencing why some parasites show a tendency to infect species widely distributed in the host phylogeny (phylogenetic generalism) whi...

Dispersal of many coastal marine species is mediated by flows with strong directionality; bathymetric and topographic effects lead to strong alongshore variability in this transport. Using a simple model of the population dynamics of competing benthic species in a coastal ocean, we found that alongshore variability in dispersal can lead to clusteri...

Illuminating the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of parasites is one of the most pressing issues facing modern science, and is critical for basic science, the global economy and human health. Extremely important to this effort are data on the disease-causing organisms of wild animal hosts (including viruses, bacteria, protozoa, helminths, arth...

Using high-throughput sequencing approaches to quantify biodiversity has a number of hurdles, in particular that the number of reads for a given taxon may not be proportional to the number of individuals of that taxon in a sample. Here, we consider whether summary statistics generated in the course of population genetic analyses (such as estimates...

We analyzed the population structure of the edible barnacle Austromegabalanus psittacus (Molina, 1782) along most of the coast of Chile. The analysis of population structure was based on nucleotide sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene region. We also tested for differences between the regions to the north and south of 30-3...

Classic biogeographic studies emphasized differences in species composition between regions to define biogeographic provinces and delimit biogeographic boundaries. Here we analyze the permeability of biogeographic boundaries to different species to gain mechanistic insight into the processes that maintain species boundaries in the coastal ocean. We...

From the beginning of the 19th century on, several small sampling trips as well as large national and international scientific expeditions have been carried out to Easter Island (EI) and Salas y Gómez Island (SGI). The objective of this study is to compile, synthesize and analyze published information about the biodiversity of macroalgae, macroi...

Larval modes of development affect evolutionary processes and influence the distribution of marine invertebrates in the ocean. The decrease in pelagic development toward higher latitudes is one of the patterns of distribution most frequently discussed in marine organisms (Thorson's rule), which has been related to increased larval mortality associa...

The evolutionary pressures that drive long larval planktonic durations in some coastal marine organisms, while allowing direct development in others, have been vigorously debated. We introduce into the argument the asymmetric dispersal of larvae by coastal currents and find that the strength of the currents helps determine which dispersal strategie...

Aim It has been proposed that the mode of larval development ( MLD ) could explain the exceptions to the latitudinal gradient of species richness exhibited by several groups of marine organisms. We evaluate the generality of the latitudinal patterns of species richness for different MLD s, and analyse the effects of environmental variables on speci...

We investigate the extent to which functional structure and spatial variability of intertidal communities coincide with major biogeographical boundaries, areas where extensive compositional changes in the biota are observed over a limited geographic extension. We then investigate whether spatial variation in the biomass of functional groups, over g...

Bray-Curtis ordination plots. Bray-Curtis ordination plots based on functional group abundances for each of the 20 sites within the two biogeographic regions and transition zone. The first two axes explained 83%, 82%, and 78% of variation on low, mid-low, and mid shores, respectively. (TIF)

Species Accumulation plot for the mid intertidal zone at Mar del Plata. (TIFF)

Total species richness (number of species summed across quadrats) across the low, mid-low, and mid intertidal zones. ND = no data. (TIF)

Correlations (Pearson) between a) mean species richness and local abundance (cover or density, see Methods) and b) mean species richness and within-site spatial variation (coefficient of variation, CV, among quadrats) of abundance across the 20 sites surveyed for the low, mid-low, and mid intertidal zones. (DOC)

Density-dependent processes may drive the population dynamics in marine species through intraspecific competition for food or space. We examined processes controlling pop - ulation dynamics in the purple clam Amiantis purpurata population of Playa Villarino (north of San Matias Gulf, Argentina) at the southernmost limits of its distribution. Popula...

Large-scale patterns of encapsulated embryo development and causal factors determining developmental success in the marine environment have been relevant issues of research for decades. We studied the embryonic development and intracapsular oxygen availability of Trophon geversianus in egg capsules from northern Patagonia (Golfo Nuevo, Argentina)....

Freshwater and marine organisms show similar models of parental care and are faced with similar constraints to brood, which suggest that comparable environmental limits drive the evolution of parental care in aquatic systems. In fact, the low diffusion coefficient and solubility of oxygen in aquatic environments affect oxygen acquisition and theref...

Freshwater and marine organisms show similar models of parental care and are faced with similar constraints to brood, which suggest that comparable environmental limits drive the evolution of parental care in aquatic systems. In fact, the low diffusion coefficient and solubility of oxygen in aquatic environments affect oxygen acquisition and theref...

Constraints in the capacity to brood, specifically supplying oxygen to aggregated embryo masses, is one of the mechanisms invoked to explain the association between small body size and brooding exhibited by marine invertebrates. We hypothesized that brooding costs may affect the capacity to supply oxygen to the brood, therefore constraining broodin...