Richard James Ladle

Federal University of Alagoas · Institute of Biological Sciences and Health (ICBS)

Although species taxonomy is an ever-evolving discipline, taxonomic change is rarely accounted for in macroecological studies. By tracking the history of species description and synonymizations of more than 900 described names of Amazonian palms, we reveal shifts in species counts across space and time, the factors associated with taxonomic lumping...

Protected Areas are widely recognized for their role in conserving biodiversity and contributing to human well-being. However, PAs are globally facing serious threats as societies and many politicians still see them as opportunity costs. In Brazil, PAs are increasingly exposed to biodiversity loss due to biophysical processes such as invasive speci...

Biodiversity conservation continues to be a global priority and insights into societal interest and support for targeted species conservation actions are essential for their success. Taking advantage of emerging culturomics methods, here we propose a new methodology for mapping societal interest towards terrestrial mammals by combining the IUCN Red...

National Parks (NPs) and other protected areas in sub‐Saharan Africa are crucial in attracting international tourists interested in wildlife tourism, contributing to national economies. Despite their cultural, economic, and conservation significance, these areas face diverse development threats, leading to pressures for protected area downgrading,...

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased towards the Global North. Incorporating social media data can complement existing gaps, especially in megadiverse countries with limited records, but whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range-shifting species is unknown. Here, we collated lo...

1. Many invasive alien species gradually become embedded within local cultures. Such species can increasingly be perceived by society as familiar and native elements of the social-ecological system and as integral parts of local cultures. 2. Here, we explore this phenomenon and define it as cultural inception. Cultural inception can greatly hinder...

Understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of species is fundamental for ecology, evolution and conservation. However, this and other aspects of biodiversity knowledge suffer from shortcomings and biases. Quantifying and mapping biodiversity knowledge shortfalls is therefore crucial to ascertain the current quality and completeness of biodiversi...

Marine chondrichthyans are experiencing a global decline, but identifying appropriate conservation actions is challenging due to the lack of basic biological information, such as growth parameters and reproduction. In this study, we identify biological and ecological attributes that can be both easily obtainable and are effective predictors of exti...

Our commentary explores the increase in cashew cultivation across West Africa, drawing attention to its impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods. We summarize the issue regionally, then showcase Guinea‐Bissau, where we unravel the dynamics between cashew expansion, habitat and biodiversity loss, and livelihoods. Finally, we propose concrete policy m...

Predicting whether a species is likely to go extinct (or not) is one of the fundamental objectives of conservation biology, and extinction risk classifications have become an essential tool for conservation policy, planning and research. This sort of prediction is feasible because the extinction processes follow a familiar pattern of population dec...

Aim Human land‐use and climate change are two of the main threats affecting biodiversity, especially in arid/semiarid regions. The most effective way to protect the species in these ecosystems against these threats is through the delimitation of protected areas (PAs). However, such PAs need to be targeted cost‐efficiently and consider future climat...

Antillean manatees (Trichechus manatus manatus) are endangered coastal, marine, and riverine megaherbivores with high environmental plasticity, constrained by tidal and seasonal water level cycles that affect access to food and fresh water. Accurate quantification of the species' habitat requirements, typically achieved through home range (HR) esti...

Islands are biodiversity hotspots that host unique assemblages. However, a substantial proportion of island species are threatened and their long‐term survival is uncertain. Identifying and preserving vulnerable species has become a priority, but it is also essential to combine this information with other facets of biodiversity like functional dive...

Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in the conservation of natural and cultural heritage while supporting local livelihoods. However, in Brazil, where limited resources and poor effectiveness lead to negative sentiments and are leveraged as criticism towards PAs, it is necessary to better comprehend public perceptions of Brazilian PAs and ident...

Many organisms will respond to climate change by shifting their ranges while pursuing potential climatically suitable areas. Predicting these area changes is important, especially in dry areas such as the Brazilian semiarid biome, the Caatinga. Here we identified which Caatinga areas would be climatically suitable for small mammal species under dif...

The gap between the number of described species and the number of species that actually exist is known as the Linnean shortfall and is of fundamental importance for biogeography and conservation. Unsurprisingly, there have been many attempts to quantify its extent for different taxa and regions. In this Perspective, we argue that such forecasts re...

Aim Insects are one of the least studied taxa, with most species lacking basic ecological and biogeographical information. This problem is particularly acute in the tropics, where low sampling effort hampers accurate estimates of species richness at scale and potentially confounds efforts to identify the drivers of biogeographical gradients. Here,...

Online digital data from media platforms have the potential to complement biodiversity monitoring efforts. We propose a strategy for integrating these data into current biodiversity datasets in light of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Adaptive management Community based management Environmental protection area costa dos corais A B S T R A C T The attitudes of local residents living adjacent to Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can influence the effectiveness of conservation management and practices, such as acceptance of the protected area rules and the willingness to participate in...

Community-based conservation has gained traction in the Brazilian Amazon due to its potential in combining territorial protection, local well-being, and biodiversity conservation. Here, we conducted an innovative assessment of the effective protection footprint of the largest community-based fisheries conservation arrangement in the Amazon. Local c...

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining to al...

Flagship species are an important tool for mobilizing support for conservation. Here, we extend this concept to include individual organisms, whose characteristics, fates, and connections to people can garner public attention, attract conservation support, and spur activism. Flagship individuals typically share a similar suite of characteristics, i...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega‐populated country, we examined the im...

Human responses to impending extinctions are complex, highly dependent on cultural and socioeconomic context, and have typically been far less studied than the ecological and genetic aspects of extinction. Specifically, the way in which science and societies respond to population decline, extirpation, and species extinction can also have a profound...

Sacred forests often comprise the last remaining native patches in the landscape, making them especially important reserves of natural resources for both local communities and biodiversity. However, changes in cultural values together with the pressing need to expand productive lands weaken the motivation to continue protecting once-sacred forests....

Societal awareness of, and engagement with, environmental problems is a critical prerequisite for effective conservation programs. Research has revealed a strong general pattern whereby public attention received by cultural products diminishes over time. If transposed to conservation, this transience of societal attention is likely to be of major i...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examin...

Species are the currency of most biodiversity studies. However, many shortfalls and biases remain in our biodiversity estimates, preventing a comprehensive understanding of the eco-evolutionary processes that have shaped the biodiversity currently available on Earth. Biased biodiversity estimates also jeopardize the effective implementation of data...

Life history theory predicts that organisms optimize their life-history traits according to evolutionary context and environmental constraints. Sympatric estuarine-dependent fish are intriguing subjects for studying life-history variation, as their traits are molded by their complex habitat use and co-occurrence with ecologically similar species. I...

Artisanal fishing is the main economic and cultural livelihood on the Brazilian coast, strongly contributing to the well-being of fishing communities. However, access to these benefits depends on both local governance and the availability of resources. Here, we investigate Brazilian artisanal fishers' perceptions of cultural, economic, governance,...

We argue that naming species in honour of a specific person is unjustifiable and out of step with equality and representation. Reforming taxonomy to remove eponyms will not be easy but could bring multiple benefits for both conservation and society.

One of the main strategies to reduce the global loss of biodiversity has been the establishment of protected areas (PAs). High quality biodiversity knowledge is essential to successfully design PAs and PA networks, and to assess their conservation effectiveness. However, biodiversity knowledge is taxonomically and geographically biased. Even though...

Public support to conservation is motivated by factors such as the desire to preserve/exploit the economic value of nature, moral concerns about the treatment of sentient animals, or appreciation of nature’s aesthetics. Species that are particularly well suited to mobilize public support, raise awareness, and stimulate conservation actions are ofte...

Elasmobranchs are among the most endangered animals, with records of decline worldwide. In this context, we aim to understand the patterns and trends of scientific production, with special emphasis on conservation. Was performed a scientometric analysis on the Web of Science platform, collecting data on scientific production between 1950 and 2019....

in press in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2598). Citation: Jarić, I., Correia, R.A., Bonaiuto, M., Brook, B.W., Courchamp, F., Firth, J.A., Gaston, K.J., Heger, T., Jeschke, J.M., Ladle, R.J., Meinard, Y., Roberts, D.L., Sherren, K., Soga, M., Soriano-Redondo, A., Veríssimo, D. and Roll, U. (2023). Transience...

in press in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2599). Citation: Jarić, I., Normande, I.C., Arbieu, U., Courchamp, F., Crowley, S.L., Jeschke, J.M., Roll, U., Sherren, K., Thomas-Walters, L., Veríssimo, D. and Ladle, R.J. (2023). Flagship individuals in biodiversity conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Enviro...

The Caatinga is an exclusively Brazilian biome, and is the largest and most biodiverse Seasonal Tropical Dry Forest in the world. Despite that, the mammalian fauna, especially small mammals, is the least studied of all Brazilian biomes. In order to fill gaps and provide detailed information on small mammals (Didelphimorphia, Rodentia) in the Caatin...

Social media data is a rich source of information to assess human activities in catastrophic events. Here, we use social media data to understand how the 2019 Brazilian oil spill influenced social attitudes. Data were collected from the globally popular Instagram platform between August 1, 2019 and March 1, 2020. First, we manually identified the 5...

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to the public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining t...

Biodiversity data can be analysed to predict species distribution at various scales of time and space. However, survey completeness and temporal decay in data quality introduce uncertainty into biodiversity models. Researchers Joaquín Hortal, Juliana Stropp (National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spain), Richard Ladle (University of Porto, Portugal),...

Oil pollution has signifi cantly contributed to coral reef decline in the last fi ve decades and a major oil spill reached Brazilian tropical coast in August 2019. Here, we report the fi rst evidence of direct crude oil contact from that spill on reef coral species, and evaluate the effects of this disaster on coral vitality and benthic assemblage...

In August 2019, the Northeast coast of Brazil was impacted by an extensive oil spill, with immediate effects on marine and coastal ecosystems and signifi cant impacts on tourism and food security. The human dimension of those impacts also includes the loss of cultural ecosystem services (CES); the non-material benefi ts stemming from strongly roote...

Crowdsourced social media data has become popular for assessing cultural ecosystem services (CES). Nevertheless, social media data analyses in the context of CES can be time consuming and costly, particularly when based on the manual classification of images or texts shared by people. The potential of deep learning for automating the analysis of cr...

An extensive network of Protected Areas (PA) has been established across the Brazilian Amazon, but this PA system still suffers from a shortage of funding resources and environmental managers. New conservation strategies that successfully align social aspirations with biodiversity conservation are therefore imperative. Although approaches exist tha...

The ongoing global biodiversity crisis not only involves biological extinctions, but also the loss of experience and the gradual fading of cultural knowledge and collective memory of species. We refer to this phenomenon as 'societal extinction of species' and apply it to both extinct and extant taxa. We describe the underlying concepts as well as t...

Continental runoff is an important source of solutes and nutrients to coastal coral reefs. Nevertheless, they can also act as local stressors due to high coastal urbanization and associated release of untreated effluents. Here we aimed to evaluate qualitatively the effects of seasonality over reefs from the Costa dos Corais Marine Protected Area (B...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are subject to many sources of uncertainty, limiting their application in research and practice. One of their main limitations is the quality of the distributional data used to calibrate them, which directly influences the accuracy of model predictions. We propose a standardized methodology to create maps, describ...

Protected areas (PAs) are often seen as opportunity costs and are therefore vulnerable to political decisions that open them up to public or private development initiatives. We reasoned that, ceteris paribus, PAs with high levels of public support should be more resilient to such decisions because; i) politicians in democratic societies are relucta...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are benefits that people receive from ecosystems, for example, through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. These are important contributors to human well-being, but are challenging to measure due to their intangible nature and because they may vary spatially depending...

Significance Sustainable-use protected areas (PAs) have contributed to tropical biodiversity conservation by deterring deforestation in multiple countries, yet their social and economic benefits to local stakeholders remain poorly understood. Amazonia hosts the largest tropical PA system on Earth, which is intended to safeguard its rich biological...

Protected areas (PAs) are the main spatial policy instrument for conserving biodiversity and have expanded dramatically in the last 30 years. This expansion has not been matched by a corresponding increase in financial investment, leaving many parks without sufficient resources for essential management actions. Moreover, in some parts of the world...

Interactions with nature promote key human health benefits and help inform sound conservation actions. During the COVID-19 lockdowns such interactions were reduced and, in many cases, limited to urban nature. Nevertheless, home-confinement regulations may have provided the impetus for people to reconnect with urban wildlife –through their windows,...

The last two decades has seen a global trend in Marine Protected Area (MPA) management from top-down to more bottom-up approaches. Moreover, recent research suggests that evaluation of MPA performance should be participative, fully engaging multiple stakeholders, including local community representatives, in the assessment process. The effectivenes...

Troumbis, 2021 identifies three main challenges/criticisms with our article that we will respond to in turn. First, they suggest that there is a "semantic circularity entrapment" of findings reported and conclusions drawn. Notwithstanding the somewhat confusing phrasing of this criticism , it is undoubtedly correct to highlight the circular reasoni...

Protected Areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation action and the most effective strategy for conserving the Earth’s biodiversity. Nevertheless, there is evidence that PAs are increasingly viewed by politicians and policy-makers as opportunity costs that constrain economic development. In the absence of societal resistance (‘push-back...

In our paper “No visit, no interest: How COVID-19 has affected public interest in world's national parks” (Souza et al., 2021) we use culturomic data and methods to provide a global overview of internet search interest in national parks during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis highlighted steep and widespread declines in searches for...

Fruit flies are economically important pests that infest a wide variety of host trees. The environmental damage caused by traditional pesticide-based control methods has prompted scientists to seek less damaging alternatives such as biological control by native species. Parasitoids, especially Braconidae species, have excellent potential as biologi...

Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation policy and have expanded dramatically over the last century. Though unequivocally beneficial for biodiversity, gazetting land for protecting nature can also be seen as an 'opportunity cost' that some politicians are unwilling to pay. One of the most effective strategies to increase th...

Ongoing loss of biological diversity is primarily the result of unsustainable human behavior. Thus, the long‐term success of biodiversity conservation depends on a thorough understanding of human–nature interactions. Such interactions are ubiquitous but vary greatly in time and space and are difficult to monitor efficiently at large spatial scales....

The World Wide Web became broadly available in August 1991, ushering in the Information Age and catalyzing profound changes in almost every aspect of human endeavor. This new age is characterized by online connectivity, real‐time interactions, and the convergence of information and communication technology, institutions, people, and processes (Cast...

In August 2019, a major oil spill hit nine Brazilian coastal states, affecting marine ecosystems and fishing communities. In this study, we assess the immediate social and economic impacts of this oil spill on fishing communities of the northeast coast. We conducted semi-structured interviews and focal meetings with 381 fishers and shellfish gather...

The use of digital content has become a powerful tool to evaluate and track macro-scale trends in human-nature relations. This is an emerging field of study known as conservation culturomics, that seeks to understand human culture through quantitative analysis in large bodies of digital content. Here, we used relative search volume on Google Search...

Studies focused on the drivers of change in species composition often fail to integrate several aspects of beta diversity and scale. Here, we assess the impact of species pool, environmental gradients, geographic distance, and spatial scale on the diversity of epiphytic bryophytes. We identify biogeographic modules of co-occurring species using net...

Conservation's capacity to deal with anthropogenic environmental threats within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) varies enormously, especially in developing countries that are often immersed in weak enforcement, ineffective management and shortages of resources. A deeper understanding of the causes of these threats is fundamental for identifying effec...

The ongoing digital revolution in the age of big data is opening new research opportunities. Culturomics and iEcology, two emerging research areas based on the analysis of online data resources, can provide novel scientific insights and inform conservation and management efforts. To date, culturomics and iEcology have been applied primarily in the...

As áreas protegidas (APs) são as principais ferramentas capazes de assegurar a preservaçãodos sistemas naturais e sua respectiva biodiversidade, principalmente no caso de áreas com prioridade para conservação, como ocorre com as áreas úmidas. A implementação de APs tem potencial para gerar benefícios fundamentais para proteger paisagens icônicas, e...

Abstract: Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) generates unique data sets that have the potential to identify and quantify trends in ecological processes that may be difficult to detect at lower temporal resolutions. Even though many LTER sites are within protected areas, they do not necessarily produce data that are well aligned with the objective...

Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) aims to monitor natural ecological processes that operate over longer time periods than are typically permitted by standard research grants (e.g. species life cycles, natural resource dynamics, and the ecological effects of climate changes). Despite the enormous success of LTER, many of the initial projects larg...

Driscoll et al. (Journal of Biogeography, 2019, 46, 2850–2859) provide a critique of ‘Countryside Biogeography’, but also include ‘Conservation Biogeography’ and ‘Agriculture Biogeography’ in their criticisms. Their main thesis is that these new sub‐disciplines offer a ‘conceptual wrapper’ rather than distinctive frameworks and that the consequent...