Tiffany Knight

Tiffany Knight
The National Tropical Botanical Garden

PhD

About

245
Publications
78,823
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13,187
Citations

Publications

Publications (245)
Article
Full-text available
Motivation Pollinators play a crucial role in maintaining Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. However, rapid human‐induced environmental changes are compromising the long‐term persistence of plant‐pollinator interactions. Unfortunately, we lack robust, generalisable data capturing how plant‐pollinator communities are structured across space and time....
Preprint
Full-text available
Many tools informing preventive invasion management build on the assumption that introduced species will conserve their climatic niches outside their native ranges. Previous research testing the validity of this assumption found contradictory results regarding niche conservatism vs. niche switching for non-native species. An open question is in how...
Article
Full-text available
Monitoring plant-pollinator interactions is crucial for understanding the factors influencing these relationships across space and time. Traditional methods in pollination ecology are resource-intensive, while time-lapse photography offers potential for non-destructive and automated complementary techniques. However, accurate identification of poll...
Preprint
Full-text available
1. Invasive alien species pose a growing threat to global biodiversity, necessitating evidence-based prevention measures. Species distribution models (SDMs) are a useful tool for quantifying the potential distribution of alien species in non-native areas and deriving blacklists based on establishment risk. Yet, uncertainties due to different modell...
Article
Full-text available
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 are expected to separately and interactively influence plant demography, this has been rarely considered in climate change experiments. We used a large‐scale experiment in central Germany to...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding mechanisms and predicting natural population responses to climate is a key goal of Ecology. However, studies explicitly linking climate to population dynamics remain limited. Antecedent effect models are a set of statistical tools that capitalize on the evidence provided by climate and population data to select time windows correlated...
Article
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Climate and land-use change are key drivers of global change. Full-factorial field experiments in which both drivers are manipulated are essential to understand and predict their potentially interactive effects on the structure and functioning of grassland ecosystems. Here, we present 8 years of data on grassland dynamics from the Global Change Exp...
Article
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Multi‐year and multi‐site demographic data for rare plants allow researchers to observe threats and project population growth rates and thus long‐term persistence of the species, generating knowledge, which allows for effective conservation planning. Demographic studies across more than a decade are extremely rare but allow for the effects of threa...
Preprint
Full-text available
Monitoring plant-pollinator interactions is crucial for understanding factors that influence these relationships across space and time. While traditional methods in pollination ecology are time-consuming and resource-intensive, the growing availability of photographic technology, coupled with advancements in artificial intelligence classification,...
Article
Plant–pollinator interactions are ecologically and economically important, and, as a result, their prediction is a crucial theoretical and applied goal for ecologists. Although various analytical methods are available, we still have a limited ability to predict plant–pollinator interactions. The predictive ability of different plant–pollinator inte...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Despite representing a fraction of the global terrestrial surface area, oceanic islands are disproportionately diverse in species, resulting from high rates of endemicity. Island plants are thought to share a unique phenotype—referred to as an island syndrome—which is thought to be driven by convergent evolution in response to selection by shared a...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Technical Report
Full-text available
• 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...
Technical Report
Full-text available
• 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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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....
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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: species abundance distribution (SAD), total community abundance, and within‐species spatial aggregation. Here we extend MoB from ca...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessments are essential for prioritizing conservation needs but are resource intensive and therefore available only for a fraction of global species richness. Automated conservation assessments based on digitally available geographic occurrence records can be a rapid alternative, but...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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,...
Article
Full-text available
• 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...