Tiffany Knight

German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig | iDiv

Understanding the responses of plant populations dynamics to climatic variability is frustrated by the need for long‐term datasets. Here, we advocate for new studies that estimate the effects of climate by sampling replicate populations in locations with similar climate. We first use data analysis on spatial locations in the conterminous USA to ass...

Human activities in mesic savanna ecosystems have resulted in plant communities that are heavily dominated by fire‐tolerant grass species, are less diverse, and offer fewer ecosystem services such as palatable plant biomass. Experimental studies manipulating fire and grass presence have mostly been conducted in ecosystems invaded by exotic grass sp...

Develoment of image recognition AI algorithms for flower-visiting arthropods has the potential to revolutionize the way we monitor pollinators. Ecologists need light-weight models that can be deployed in a field setting and can classify with high accuracy. We tested the performance of three deep learning light-weight models, YOLOv5nano, YOLOv5small...

Climate variability will increase with climate change, and thus it is important for population ecologists to understand its consequences for population dynamics. Four components are known to mediate the consequences of climate variability: the magnitude of climate variability, the effect size of climate on vital rates, covariance between vital rate...

Stage‐based demographic methods, such as matrix population models (MPMs), are powerful tools used to address a broad range of fundamental questions in ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation science. Accordingly, MPMs now exist for over 3000 species worldwide. These data are being digitised as an ongoing process and periodically released int...

Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) are often used to project species distributions within alien ranges and in future climatic scenarios. However, ENMs depend on species-environment equilibrium, which may be absent for actively expanding species. We present a novel framework to estimate whether species have reached environmental equilibrium in their nat...

• A partir da avaliação da demanda e oferta de polinizadores em uma área, é possível definir um planejamento da paisagem que beneficie a produtividade agrícola, a segurança alimentar e a conservação da biodiversidade; • Propriedades rurais com áreas naturais conservadas e práticas agrícolas amigáveis à biodiversidade se beneficiam mais da polinizaç...

• Assessing pollinator supply and demand is a useful tool for designing landscape management strategies to improve agricultural productivity, food security and biodiversity conservation; • Rural properties with conserved natural areas and biodiversity-friendly agricultural practices benefit more from crop pollination and contribute to the conservat...

Ecological communities are maintained through species interactions, and the resilience of species interactions is critical to the persistence of natural communities. Keystone species play outsized roles in maintaining species interaction networks, and within plant-pollinator communities are high priorities for conservation. The loss of a keystone p...

Climate change is one of the largest threats to grassland plant species, which can be modified by land management. Although climate change and land management can separately and interactively influence plant demography this has been rarely considered within one experimental set-up. We used a large-scale experiment to quantify the effects of grassla...

Quantitative assessments of endemism, evolutionary distinctiveness and extinction threat underpin global conservation prioritization for well-studied taxa, such as birds, mammals, and amphibians. However, such information is unavailable for most of the world’s taxa. This is the case for the Orchidaceae, a hyperdiverse and cosmopolitan family with i...

Both plant nectar production and insect activity are highly dependent on abiotic environmental conditions. Furthermore, the foraging behaviour of insect pollinators can be affected by nectar properties. In the context of climate change, it is important to understand how plant-pollinator interactions respond to temperature and other abiotic factors....

Develoment of image recognition AI algorithms for flower-visiting arthropods has the potential to revolutionize the way we monitor pollinators. Ecologists need light-weight models that can be deployed in a field setting and can classify with high accuracy. We tested the performance of three deep learning light-weight models, YOLOv5nano, YOLOv5small...

Conserving the tree species of the world requires syntheses on which tree species are most vulnerable to pressing threats, such as climate change, invasive pests and pathogens, or selective logging. Here, we review the population and forest dynamics models that, when parameterized with data from population studies, forest inventories, or tree rings...

Stage-based demographic methods, such as matrix population models (MPMs), are powerful tools used to address a broad range of fundamental questions in ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation science. Accordingly, MPMs now exist for over 3,000 species worldwide. These data are being digitised as an ongoing process and periodically released i...

Animal-mediated pollination is a vital ecosystem service to crops and wild plants, and long-term stability of plant–pollinator interactions is therefore crucial for maintaining plant biodiversity and food security. However, it is unknown how the composition of pollinators and the structure of pollinator interactions have changed across longer time...

Mutualistic interactions between plants and animal pollinators are increasingly under threat through anthropogenic change, and it is critical to understand how temporal changes affect the structure and function of these ecologically important interactions. Because the responses of plant–pollinator interactions to anthropogenic change may take place...

Objectives Historical ecological records document the diversity and composition of communities decades or centuries ago. They can provide a valuable benchmark for comparisons with modern communities. Historical datasets on plant-animal interactions allow for modern comparisons that examine the stability of species and interaction networks over long...

Understanding the responses of plant populations dynamics to climatic variability is frustrated by the need for long term datasets that capture demographic responses to a range of climates. Here, we advocate for new studies that prioritize spatial over temporal replication, but without inferring the effect of temporal climatic gradients from spatia...

The same features that generate biodiversity patterns across and within oceanic islands over evolutionary time - interactions between isolation, area, and heterogeneity - also influence their vulnerability to biological invasions. Here, we identify the factors that shape the richness and abundance of woody aliens in forest communities across the Ha...

Discrete time structured population projection models are an important tool for studying population dynamics. Within this field, integral projection models (IPMs) have become a popular method for studying populations structured by continuously distributed traits (e.g. height, weight). Databases of discrete time, discrete state structured population...

Environmental monitoring involves the quantification of microscopic cells and particles such as algae, plant cells, pollen, or fungal spores. Traditional methods using conventional microscopy require expert knowledge, are time‐intensive and not well‐suited for automated high throughput. Multispectral imaging flow cytometry (MIFC) allows measurement...

Understanding or predicting the responses of natural populations to climate is an urgent task for ecologists. However, studies linking the temporal dynamics of populations to climate remain limited. In population ecology, studies typically assume that populations respond only to the climate of the most recent growing season or year. However, eviden...

Discrete time structured population projection models are an important tool for studying population dynamics. Within this field, Integral Projection Models (IPMs) have become a popular method for studying populations structured by continuously distributed traits (e.g. height, weight). Databases of discrete time, discrete state structured population...

Climate change has the potential to alter plant reproductive success directly and indirectly through disruptions in animal pollination. Climate models project altered seasonal precipitation patterns, and thus, the effects of climate change on available resources and pollination services will depend on the season. Plants have evolved reproductive st...

The reintroduction of rare species in natural preserves is a commonly used restoration strategy to prevent species extinction. An essential first step in planning successful reintroductions is identifying which life stages (e.g., seeds or large adults) should be used to establish these new populations. Following this initial establishment phase, it...

The Decade on Ecosystem Restoration aims to provide the means and incentives for upscaling restoration efforts worldwide. Although ecosystem restoration is a broad, interdisciplinary concept, effective ecological restoration requires sound ecological knowledge to successfully restore biodiversity and ecosystem services in degraded landscapes. We em...

Mass-flowering crops, such as Oilseed Rape (OSR), provide resources for pollinators and benefit from pollination services. Studies that observe the community of interactions between plants and pollinators are critical to understanding the resource needs of pollinators. We observed pollinators on OSR and wild plants in adjacent semi-natural areas in...

Human-induced disturbances to ecosystems cause a direct loss of biodiversity, and also alter the inherent processes that shape ecosystems even after the main disturbance has ceased. Therefore, is it important to understand the ongoing consequences of past and present land use practices on both above- and belowground components of agroecosystems. Ou...

In the face of global pollinator decline, extensively managed grasslands play an important role in supporting stable pollinator communities. However, different types of extensive management may promote particular plant species and thus particular functional traits. As the functional traits of flowering plant species (e.g., flower size and shape) in...

In order to synthesize changes in pollinating insect communities across space and time, it is necessary to understand whether, and how, sampling methods influence assessments of community patterns. We compared how two common sampling methods-yellow combined flight traps and net sampling-influence our understanding of the species richness, abundance...

Climate change has the potential to alter plant reproductive success directly and indirectly through disruptions in animal pollination. Climate models project altered seasonal precipitation patterns and thus the effects of climate change on available resources and pollination services will depend on the season. Plants have evolved reproductive stra...

Integral projection models (IPMs) are an important tool for studying the dynamics of populations structured by one or more continuous traits (e.g. size, height, body mass). Researchers use IPMs to investigate questions ranging from linking drivers to population dynamics, planning conservation and management strategies, and quantifying selective pre...

The Pacific Region has the highest density of naturalised plant species worldwide, which makes it an important area for research on the ecology, evolution and biogeography of biological invasions. While different data sources on naturalised plant species exist for the Pacific, there is no taxonomically and spatially harmonised database available fo...

Climate and land management are important environmental drivers that affect the structure of terrestrial plant communities worldwide. Demographic studies allow a mechanistic understanding of the pathways in which environmental factors change population size. Climate and land management might interactively influence vital rates and growth rates of p...

Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires an understanding of the magnitude and nature by which climate change will influence the diversity of plants across the world’s ecosystems. Experiments can causally link precipitation change to plant diversity change, however, these experiments vary in their methods and in the diversity metrics repo...

Georeferenced biological data of species distributions, abundances or traits are critical for ecological and evolutionary research. However, the accuracy (true vs. false records) and biogeographical status (native vs. alien) of individual georeferenced records are often unclear, which limits their use in species distribution modelling, analyses of...

Carpobrotus species are harmful invaders to coastal areas throughout the world, particularly in Mediterranean habitats. Demographic models are ideally suited to identify and understand population processes and stages in the life cycle of the species that could be most effectively targeted with management. However, parameterizing these models has be...

Approximately 25% of mammals are currently threatened with extinction, a risk that is amplified under climate change. Species persistence under climate change is determined by the combined effects of climatic factors on multiple demographic rates (survival, development and reproduction), and hence, population dynamics. Thus, to quantify which speci...

Aims Trees dominate the biomass in many ecosystems and are essential for ecosystem functioning and human well‐being. They are also one of the best studied functional groups of plants, with vast amounts of biodiversity data available in scattered sources. We here aim to illustrate that an efficient integration of this data could produce a more holis...

Climate change has the potential to reduce the abundance and distribution of species and threaten global biodiversity, but it is typically not listed as a threat in classifying species conservation status. This likely occurs because demonstrating climate change as a threat requires data‐intensive demographic information. Moreover, the threat from c...

There is an urgent need to synthesize the state of our knowledge on plant responses to climate. The availability of open-access data provide opportunities to examine quantitative generalizations regarding which biomes and species are most responsive to climate drivers. Here, we synthesize time series of structured population models from 162 populat...

Aim: The Pacific exhibits an exceptional number of naturalized plant species, but the drivers of this high diversity and the associated compositional patterns remain largely unknown. Here, we aim to (a) improve our understanding of introduction and establishment processes and (b) evaluate whether this information is sufficient to create scientific...

Understanding the effects of climate on the vital rates (e.g., survival, development, reproduction) and dynamics of natural populations is a long-standing quest in ecology, with ever-increasing relevance in the face of climate change. However, linking climate drivers to demographic processes requires identifying the appropriate time windows during...

Carpobrotus species are harmful invaders to coastal areas throughout the world, particularly in Mediterranean habitats. Demographic models are ideally suited to identify and understand population processes and stages in the life cycle of the species that could be most effectively targeted with management. However, parameterizing these models has be...

Our understanding of how pollinator activity varies over short temporal scales is limited because most research on pollination is based on data collected during the day that is then aggregated at a larger temporal scale. To understand how environmental factors affect plant–pollinator interactions, it is critical that studies include the entire diel...

Effective interactions between plants and pollinators are essential for the reproduction of plant species. Pollinator exclusion experiments and pollen supplementation experiments quantify the degree to which plants depend on animal pollinators and the degree to which plant reproduction is pollen limited. Pollen supplementation experiments have been...

Most studies of plant–animal mutualistic networks have come from a temporally static perspective. This approach has revealed general patterns in network structure, but limits our ability to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape these networks and to predict the consequences of natural and human‐driven disturbance on specie...

Disentangling the drivers of diversity gradients can be challenging. The Measurement of Biodiversity (MoB) framework decomposes scale‐dependent changes in species diversity into three components of community structure: the species abundance distribution (SAD), the total community abundance, and the within‐species spatial aggregation. Here we extend...

• Land management is known to have consequences for biodiversity; however, our synthetic understanding of its effects is limited due to highly variable results across studies, which vary in the focal taxa and spatial grain considered, as well as the response variables reported. Such synthetic knowledge is necessary for management of agroecosystems...

IUCN Red List assessments are essential for prioritizing conservation needs but are resource‐intensive and therefore only available for a fraction of global species richness. Automated conservation assessments based on digitally available geographic occurrence records can be a rapid alternative, but it is unclear how reliable these assessments are....

Pollen identification and quantification are crucial but challenging tasks in addressing a variety of evolutionary and ecological questions (pollination, paleobotany), but also for other fields of research (e.g. allergology, honey analysis or forensics). Researchers are exploring alternative methods to automate these tasks but, for several reasons,...

Although habitat loss is the predominant factor leading to biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene1,2, exactly how this loss manifests—and at which scales—remains a central debate3,4,5,6. The ‘passive sampling’ hypothesis suggests that species are lost in proportion to their abundance and distribution in the natural habitat7,8, whereas the ‘ecosystem...

Land use change, by disrupting the co-evolved interactions between plants and their pollinators, could be causing plant reproduction to be limited by pollen supply. Using a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis on over 2200 experimental studies and more than 1200 wild plants, we ask if land use intensification is causing plant reproduction to b...

Climate change has the potential to reduce the abundance and distribution of species and threaten global biodiversity, but it is typically not listed as a threat in classifying species conservation status. This likely occurs because demonstrating climate change as a threat requires data-intensive demographic information. Moreover, the threat from c...

Several invasion hypotheses predict a positive association between phylogenetic and functional distinctiveness of aliens and their performance, leading to the idea that distinct aliens compete less with their resident communities. However, synthetic pattern relationships between distinctiveness and alien performance and direct tests of competition...

To mitigate and adapt to climate change, there is an urgent need to synthesize the state of our knowledge on plant responses to climate. The availability of open-access data, combined with our understanding of plant physiology and life history theory provide opportunities to examine quantitative generalizations regarding which biomes and species ar...

IUCN Red List assessments are essential for prioritizing conservation needs but are resource-intensive and therefore only available for a fraction of global species richness. Tropical plant species are particularly under-represented on the IUCN Red List. Automated conservation assessments based on digitally available geographic occurrence records c...

Pathogens have the potential to shape plant community structure, and thus, it is important to understand the factors that determine pathogen diversity and infection in communities. The abundance, origin, and evolutionary relationships of plant hosts are all known to influence pathogen patterns and are typically studied separately. We present an obs...

The study of mutualistic interaction networks has led to valuable insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, our understanding of network structure may depend upon the temporal scale at which we sample and analyze network data. To date, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the temporal scale‐dependence of network structure acros...

Background and Aims Displacement of native plant species by non-native invaders may result from differences in their carbon economy, yet little is known regarding how variation in leaf traits influences native-invader dynamics across climate gradients. In Hawaii, one of the most heavily invaded biodiversity hotspots in the world, strong spatial var...

The role of individual plant species, including those that are rare or invasive, in the structure of plant-pollinator networks will depend on how connected the plants are to pollinator species and when they flower. Plant species visited by a high diversity of pollinators that visit few other species during a particular time period are thought to pr...

What will plant communities of the future look like in the face of climate change? Answering this question is critical if we are to understand novel ecosystems, and their potential services. De Boeck and colleagues (2019) suggest that our conclusions (Korell et al. 2019) were too “gloomy” when we indicated that the majority of climate manipulations...