Thomas Frederick Johnson

• PhD
• PDRA at The University of Sheffield

Aim Trait data are widely used in ecological and evolutionary phylogenetic comparative studies, but often values are not available for all species of interest. Traditionally, researchers have excluded species without data from analyses, but estimation of missing values using imputation has been proposed as a better approach. However, imputation met...

Human perceptions of nature, once the domain of the social sciences, are now an important part of environmental research. However, the data and tools to tackle this research are lacking or are difficult to apply. Here, we present a collection of text classifier models to identify text relevant to the broad topics of hunting and nature, describing w...

Motivation Population trend information is an ‘Essential Biodiversity Variable’ for monitoring change in biodiversity over time. Here, we present a global dataset of 1122 population trends describing changes in abundance over time in large mammals from the Order Carnivora – some of the world’s most charismatic and functionally important fauna. Mai...

As the impact of anthropogenic activity on the environment has grown, research into biodiversity change and associated threats has also accelerated. Synthesising this vast literature is important for understanding the drivers of biodiversity change and identifying those actions that will mitigate further ecological losses. However, keeping pace wit...

Land-use and climate change have been linked to changes in wildlife populations, but the role of socioeconomic factors in driving declines, and promoting population recoveries, remains relatively unexplored. Here, we evaluate potential drivers of population changes observed in 50 species of some of the world’s most charismatic and functionally impo...

Anthropogenic threats are reshaping Earth’s biodiversity at an unprecedented rate and scale 1–3 . Conservation policies often prioritise threats like habitat loss and exploitation based on their global prevalence. However, these assessments rarely quantify the impacts of individual or interacting threats, potential masking the true effects of the A...

Large language models (LLM) have proved to be highly popular since the release of ChatGPT, leading many researchers to explore their potential across multiple fields of scientific research. In a recent Perspective, Cooper et al. (2024) highlight a set of benefits and challenges for the use of LLMs in ecology, emphasising their value to coding in re...

Large‐language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate research in ecology and evolution, cultivating new insights and innovation. However, whilst revelling in the plethora of opportunities, researchers need to consider that LLM use could also introduce risks. An important piece of context underpinning this perspective is the pressure to pub...

This anthology brings together a diversity of key texts in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. It serves to complement the previous volume The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies by providing open access to original research and insights in this rapidly evolving field. At its heart, this book highlights the o...

Global change constitutes a suite of major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. These threats can materialise via changes in the temporal stability of ecological communities and the services they provide. However, the majority of research on stability has focused on single trophic level communities and has not yet integrated classic t...

Biodiversity faces unprecedented threats from rapid global change¹. Signals of biodiversity change come from time-series abundance datasets for thousands of species over large geographic and temporal scales. Analyses of these biodiversity datasets have pointed to varied trends in abundance, including increases and decreases. However, these analyses...

Harnessing science‐based policy is key to addressing global challenges like the biodiversity and climate crises. Open research principles underpin effective science‐based policy, but the uptake of these principles is likely constrained by the politicisation, commoditisation and conflicting motives of stakeholders in the research landscape. Here, us...

Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting toward a set of systems that describe changes in real time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the rollout of real‐time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions betwee...

Social media is an arena of debate for contentious political and social topics. One conservation topic debated online is the acceptability of trophy hunting, a debate that has implications for national and international policy. We used a mixed‐methods approach (grounded theory and quantitative clustering) to identify themes in the trophy hunting de...

Harnessing science-based policy is key to addressing global challenges like the biodiversity crisis. Open research principles underpin effective science-based policy, but the uptake of these principles is likely constrained by the politicisation, commoditisation, and conflicting motives of stakeholders in the research landscape. Here, using the mis...

In the face of rapid global change and an uncertain fate for biodiversity, it is vital to quantify trends in wild populations. These trends are typically estimated from abundance time series for suites of species across large geographic and temporal scales. Such data implicitly contain phylogenetic, spatial, and temporal structure which, if not pro...

Government policies are key to combating climate change and biodiversity loss. Here, we examine whether environmental messages on Twitter by UK politicians can be used to predict the probability of politicians voting-in pro-environmental policy. Using historical Twitter data and voting records, we determine that the number of tweets by UK politicia...

Nest‐site selection by species is expected to be adaptive and lead to improved breeding productivity, but in some settings, there exist mismatches between preferred nesting habitat and breeding productivity. We tested the expectation that nest‐site selection is adaptive in a sample of 63 nests of a long‐lived social species that breeds and forages...

Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting towards a set of systems that describe changes in real-time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the roll-out of real-time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions betw...

Motivation Population trend information is an ‘essential biodiversity variable’ for monitoring change in biodiversity over time. Here, we present a database of 1,122 population trends from around the world, describing changes in abundance over time in large mammal species ( n = 50) from four families in the order Carnivora. For this subset of taxa,...

Companies and related consumer behaviours contribute significantly to global carbon emissions. However, consumer behaviour is shifting, with the public now recognising the real and immediate impact of climate change. Many companies are aware and seemingly eager to align to consumer’s increasing environmental consciousness, yet there is a risk that...

Land-use and climate change have been linked to wildlife population declines, but the role of socioeconomic factors in driving declines, and promoting population recoveries, remains relatively unexplored despite its likely importance. Here, we evaluate a comprehensive array of potential drivers of population changes observed in some of the world's...

Men with Stuttering Priapism (SP) and sleep-related painful erections (SRPE) experience bothersome nocturnal painful erections resulting in poor sleep. The aim of this study is to observe common features and differences between men with SP and SRPE based on polysomnography, nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT), and penile doppler ultrasound (PDU). Thi...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe impacts on global public health. In England, social distancing measures and a nationwide lockdown were introduced to reduce the spread of the virus. Green space accessibility may have been particularly important during this lockdown, as it could have provided benefits for physical and mental wellbeing. However,...

In recent decades, the pied crow Corvus albus population has grown in southern Africa, and this may have had impacts on other species. Conservationists and land managers may question the degree of threat posed by pied crows to other species, but a scarcity of ecological information on pied crows limits evidence-based decision-making. Using a distan...

Human perceptions of nature, once the domain of the social sciences, are now an important part of environmental research. In ecology, cultural values have become a key component of ecosystem services, and in conservation, people’s perceptions can influence which species are traded, protected, and persecuted. This transdisciplinary shift has brought...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe impacts on global public health. In the UK, social distancing measures and a nationwide lockdown were introduced to reduce the spread of the virus. Green space accessibility may have been particularly important during this lockdown, as it could have provided benefits for physical and mental wellbeing, while also...

Ischaemic priapism (IP) is characterised by a persistent, painful penile erection lasting for >4 h. Many causes of IP have been identified including haematological dyscrasias (particularly, sickle cell disease), drugs and rarely malignancy. There are also a large proportion of men, in which no aetiology is identified. Identification of men at risk...

The study of existential risk — the risk of human extinction or the collapse of human civilization — has only recently emerged as an integrated field of research, and yet an overwhelming volume of relevant research has already been published. To provide an evidence base for policy and risk analysis, this research should be systematically reviewed....

Pre-print of our article investigating the interactions between Pied Crows and breeding White-backed Vultures in South Africa

African White-backed vultures Gyps africanus are Critically Endangered, mainly due to mortality from poisoning, but the species also exhibits variable breeding productivity that may partially be explained by nest failure due to predation. Pied crows Corvus albus have been implicated as nest predators, but because there is no evidence linking Pied c...

Objective To describe the prevalence of Y‐chromosome microdeletions in a multi‐ethnic urban population in London, UK. To also determine predictive factors and a clinical threshold for genetic testing in men with Y chromosome microdeletions. Patients and Methods A retrospective cohort study of 1473 men that were referred to a tertiary Andrology cen...

Translocations are a valuable tool within conservation, and when performed successfully can rescue species from extinction. However, to label a translocation a success, extensive post-translocation monitoring is required, ensuring the population is growing at the expected rate. In 2011, a habitat assessment identified Frégate Island as a suitable i...