T. Mitchell Aide

University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras | UPR-RP · Department of Biology

Biodiversity monitoring depends on reliable species identification, but it can often be difficult due to detectability or survey constraints, especially for rare and endangered species. Advances in bioacoustic monitoring and AI-assisted classification are improving our ability to carry out long-term studies, of a large proportion of the fauna, even...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001674.].

Forests that regrow naturally on abandoned fields are important for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but can they also preserve the distinct regional tree floras? Using the floristic composition of 1215 early successional forests (≤20 years) in 75 human-modified landscapes across the Neotropic realm, we identified 14 distinct floristi...

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperate-zone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues. Tropical biology is currently largely absent...

Humans place strong pressure on land and have modified around 75% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. In this context, ecoregions and biomes, merely defined on the basis of their biophysical features, are incomplete characterizations of the territory. Land system science requires classification schemes that incorporate both social and biophysical dimen...

Land cover divergences across international borders reflect how country-level policies influence ecological footprints on the landscape. We identified 30 abrupt transboundary divergences across the globe, with major land cover differences despite similar ecological conditions. Divergences were significantly associated with differences in Gross Dome...

Urbanization usually reduces bat richness; however, the presence of green areas within cities and peripheral rural areas in arid ecosystems may provide microhabitats for some species. Light pollution is a major feature of urbanization, but its impact on bat behavior appears to be species-specific and previous studies have documented contrasting res...

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are pre- dicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosyste...

Climate change is altering the spatial distribution of many species around the world. In response, we need to identify and protect suitable areas for a large proportion of the fauna so that they persist through time. This exercise must also evaluate the ability of existing protected areas to provide safe havens for species in the context of climate...

The effects of forest degradation, fragmentation, and climate change occur over long time periods, yet relatively few data are available to evaluate the long-term effects of these disturbances on tropical species occurrence. Here, we quantified changes in occupancy of 50 bird species over 17 years on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, a model sys...

During the last few decades, much attention has focused on how global change is affecting the environment and species distributions. Land‐use change is still the major cause of species declines worldwide, but changes in species distributions have been documented even in pristine and protected areas. Here, we document the distribution dynamics of 26...

Estimates of forest cover have important political, conservation, and funding implications, but methods vary greatly. Haiti has often been cited as one of the most deforested countries in the world, yet estimates of forest cover range from <1% to 33%. Here, we analyze land change for seven land cover classes (forest, shrub land, agriculture/pasture...

In this study, we evaluated deep convolutional neural networks for classifying the calls of 24 birds and amphibian species detected in ambient field recordings from the tropical mountains of Puerto Rico. Training data were collected using a template-based detection algorithm and manually validated with a graphical interface. To reduce the labor int...

Carbon sequestration through tropical reforestation and natural regeneration could make an important contribution to climate change mitigation, given that forest cover in many tropical regions increased during the early part of the 21st century. The size of this carbon sink will depend on the degree to which second-growth forests are permanent and...

Automated acoustic recorders can collect long-term soundscape data containing species-specific signals in remote environments. Ecologists have increasingly used them for studying diverse fauna around the globe. Deep learning methods have gained recent attention for automating the process of species identification in soundscape recordings. We presen...

Protected areas (PAs) are important mechanisms for conserving biodiversity and buffering anthropogenic pressures, but the expansion and intensification of human activities within and around PAs are threatening the biological diversity they are designed to protect. In South America, a region which includes many biodiversity hotspots (e.g., Atlantic...

Conversion of land cover is one of the main causes of global environmental change and identifying the regions where sustained trends of land change are occurring provides useful information for land and resources management. For all ecoregions in Mexico, we analyzed land use changes over 14 years (2001–2014) using MODIS images (250 m) and identifie...

The built environment, defined as all human-made infrastructure, is increasing to fulfill the demand for human settlements, productive systems, mining, and industries. Due to the profound direct and indirect impacts that the built environment produces on natural ecosystems, it is considered a major driver of land change and biodiversity loss, and a...

Commodity crop expansion remains a leading driver of deforestation and defaunation in the tropics. Voluntary certification standards are the primary mechanism for making commodity production more sustainable and rely on the High Conservation Value (HCV) framework for protecting biodiversity on farms. In the oil palm sector, the HCV approach require...

Despite several efforts to quantify the effectiveness of forest certification in developing sustainable use of forest resources, there is little evidence that certified forests are more effective in conserving fauna than non‐certified managed forest. To evaluate the impact of forest certification on the fauna, we compared the biodiversity in refere...

In the original publication of the article the below given funding information was missed and now it is included in this correction

Context Expanding oil palm plantations have caused widespread deforestation and biodiversity loss in Southeast Asia, stigmatizing the industry around the world regardless of regional context. In Latin America, oil palm plantations are primarily replacing other agroindustrial land uses with uncertain implications for local biodiversity. Objectives...

In tropical regions, many studies have focused on how vegetation and ecosystem processes recover following the abandonment of anthropogenic activities, but less attention has been given to the recovery patterns of vertebrates. Here we conduct a meta‐analysis (n = 147 studies) of amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal recovery during tropical secondar...

Old-growth tropical forests harbor an immense diversity of tree species but are rapidly being cleared, while secondary forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural lands increase in extent. We assess how tree species richness and composition recover during secondary succession across gradients in environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturba...

The interactions between climate and land-use change are dictating the distribution of flora and fauna and reshuffling biotic community composition around the world. Tropical mountains are particularly sensitive because they often have a high human population density, a long history of agriculture, range-restricted species, and high-beta diversity...

This is the Supplementary information of the paper published in Oikos "Recovery of amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal diversity during secondary forest succession in the tropics"

Tropical reforestation is a significant component of global environmental change that is far less understood than tropical deforestation, despite having apparently increased widely in scale during recent decades. The regional contexts defining such reforestation have not been well described. They are likely to differ significantly from the geograph...

The expansion of built environment is a major driver of land change, which can have irreversible consequences on the environment, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. While most studies have focused on urban areas, particularly large cities, the built environment includes much more. This is exemplified by the complex interconnection among cities o...

Knowledge that can be gained from acoustic data collection in tropical ecosystems is low‐hanging fruit. There is every reason to record and with every day, there are fewer excuses not to do it. In recent years, the cost of acoustic recorders has decreased substantially (some can be purchased for under US$50, e.g., Hill et al. 2018) and the technolo...

The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of...

Elevational gradients influence the distribution and composition of animal species and can provide useful information for the development of conservation strategies in the context of climate change. Despite an increase in studies of species diversity along elevational gradients, there is still a lack of information about community responses to envi...

Background Climate change and infectious diseases threaten animal and plant species, even in natural and protected areas. To cope with these changes, species may acclimate, adapt, move or decline. Here, we test for shifts in anuran distributions in the Luquillo Mountains (LM), a tropical montane forest in Puerto Rico by comparing species distributi...

Summary of unique georeferenced locations from GBIF for each species

Summary of model selection procedure for 11 species of native frogs in the Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico Given are the number of parameters (#Par); twice the negative log-likelihhod (AIC); the relative difference in AIC values compared to the top-ranked model (ΔAIC); the AIC model weights (AICwt); and the cumulative weights (CumWt).

Summary of elevational range changes for 14 species Significant shifts (>100 m) are in red for extirpations and green for colonization, while no-significant shifts are in grey.

Cumulative AIC weights based on 9 occupancy models averaged using the AIC weights

Summary of museum institutions from GBIF and number of records from each species

Nine alternative occupancy models for the current distribution data sets

Summary of the historical data compilation Quantitative data refers to information about the presence of the species associated with a specific georeferenced location while qualitative data refers to general information about species distribution range.

Summary of GLM model selection procedure for 13 species of native frogs in the Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico Given are the number of parameters (#Par); the log-likelihhod (logLik); twice the negative log-likelihhod (AIC); the relative difference in AIC values compared to the top-ranked model (ΔAIC) and the AIC model weights (AICwt).

Acoustic ecology, or ecoacoustics, is a growing field that uses sound as a tool to evaluate animal communities. In this manuscript, we evaluate recordings from eight tropical forest sites that vary in species richness, from a relatively low diversity Caribbean forest to a megadiverse Amazonian forest, with the goal of understanding the relationship...

Acoustic ecology, or ecoacoustics, is a growing field that uses sound as a tool to evaluate animal communities. In this manuscript, we evaluate recordings from eight tropical forest sites that vary in species richness, from a relatively low diversity Caribbean forest to a megadiverse Amazonian forest, with the goal of understanding the relationship...

An upward shift in elevation is one of the most conspicuous species responses to climate change. Nevertheless, downward shifts and, apparently, the absences of response have also been recently reported. Given the growing evidence of multiple responses of species distributions due to climate change and the paucity of studies in the tropics, we evalu...

This article reviews the current status, trends and challenges of land system science in Latin America. We highlight the advances in the conceptualization, analysis and monitoring of land systems. These advances shift from a focus on the relationships between forests and other land uses to include a greater diversity of land cover and land-use type...

We developed a web-based cloud-hosted system that allow users to archive, listen, visualize, and annotate recordings. The system also provides tools to convert these annotations into datasets that can be used to train a computer to detect the presence or absence of a species. The algorithm used by the system was selected after comparing the accurac...

Natural resource extraction is increasing rapidly in tropical forests, but we lag behind in understanding the impacts of these disturbances on biodiversity. In high diversity tropical habitats, acoustic monitoring is an efficient tool for sampling a large proportion of the fauna across varied spatial and temporal scales. We used passive acoustic mo...

Commodity crop expansion has increased with the globalization of production systems and consumer demand, linking distant socio-ecological systems. Oil palm plantations are expanding in the tropics to satisfy growing oilseed and biofuel markets, and much of this expansion has caused extensive deforestation, especially in Asia. In Latin America, palm...

We developed a web-based cloud-hosted system that allow users to archive, listen, visualize, and annotate recordings. The system also provides tools to convert these annotations into datasets that can be used to train a computer to detect the presence or absence of a species. The algorithm used by the system was selected after comparing the accurac...

We developed a web-based cloud-hosted system that allow users to archive, listen, visualize, and annotate recordings. The system also provides tools to convert these annotations into datasets that can be used to train a computer to detect the presence or absence of a species. The algorithm used by the system was selected after comparing the accurac...

The jaguar is the top predator of the Atlantic Forest (AF), which is a highly threatened biodiversity hotspot that occurs in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. By combining data sets from 14 research groups across the region, we determine the population status of the jaguar and propose a spatial prioritization for conservation actions. About 85% of th...

The acoustic space in a given environment is filled with footprints arising from three processes: biophony, geophony and anthrophony. Bioacoustic research using passive acoustic sensors can result in thousands of recordings. An important component of processing these recordings is to automate signal detection. In this paper, we describe a new spect...

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM) is becoming a significant cause of environmental degradation in tropical ecosystems. In this study, we conducted a rapid assessment on the impact of an ASM gold mine on the vocalizig avian and anuran communities in the buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru. We used seven audio recorders (t...

Conservation of threatened species relies on predictions about their spatial distribution; however, it is often difficult to detect species in the wild. The combination of acoustic monitoring to improve species detectability and statistical methods to account for false‐negative detections can improve species distribution estimates. Here, we combine...

Regrowth of tropical secondary forests following complete or nearly complete removal of forest vegetation actively stores carbon in aboveground biomass, partially counterbalancing carbon emissions from deforestation, forest degradation, burning of fossil fuels, and other anthropogenic sources. We estimate the age and spatial extent of lowland secon...

Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land...

Question Understanding how the relative importance of different community assembly processes changes during secondary succession of diverse systems remains elusive. Functional and phylogenetic approaches that place species along continuous axes of niche differentiation and evolutionary relatedness, however, are deepening our understanding of the me...

Tropical forests harbor a significant portion of global biodiversity and are a critical component of the climate system. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation contributes to global climate-change mitigation efforts, yet emissions and removals from forest dynamics are still poorly quantified. We reviewed the main challenges to estimate chang...

Latin America has the planet’s largest land reserves for agriculture and had the most rapid agricultural expansion during the twenty-first century. A large portion of the expansion replaced forests, as shown by many local and regional studies. However, expansion varied regionally and also replaced other land covers. Further, it is important to dist...

The current global gold rush, driven by increasing consumption in developing countries and uncertainty in financial markets, is an increasing threat for tropical ecosystems. Gold mining causes significant alteration to the environment, yet mining is often overlooked in deforestation analyses because it occupies relatively small areas. As a result,...

The conversion of natural areas to human-dominated land uses has been the major cause of global biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation. Protected areas have been the most common strategy for reducing habitat and species loss. Effective conservation planning requires current information on land change dynamics, and the factors driving these...