Publications related to Keystone species

From roots to canopy: Unraveling the influence of species diversity on tree water relations under warmer and drier climates

The worsening of drought events with rising air temperature alters tree water relations causing severe hydraulic impairments and widespread forest mortality. Mixing tree species with contrasting hydraulic traits could reduce forest vulnerability to extreme ...

EPFL2024

On the selection and effectiveness of pseudo-absences for species distribution modeling with deep learning

Devis Tuia, Nina Marion Aurélia Van Tiel, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger, Robin Adrien Zbinden, Lloyd Haydn Hughes

Species distribution modeling is a highly versatile tool for understanding the intricate relationship between environmental conditions and species occurrences. However, the available data often lacks information on confirmed species absence and is limited ...

2024

Chronic warming and dry soils limit carbon uptake and growth despite a longer growing season in beech and oak

Charlotte Grossiord, Yann Vitasse, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency

Progressively warmer and drier climatic conditions impact tree phenology and carbon cycling with large consequences for forest carbon balance. However, it remains unclear how individual impacts of warming and drier soils differ from their combined effects ...

Oxford Univ Press Inc2023

Interactions between beech and oak seedlings can modify the effects of hotter droughts and the onset of hydraulic failure

Charlotte Grossiord, Eugénie Isabelle Mas, Hervé Cochard, Janisse Deluigi, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency, Fernando Valladares

center dot Mixing species with contrasting resource use strategies could reduce forest vulnerability to extreme events. Yet, how species diversity affects seedling hydraulic responses to heat and drought, including mortality risk, is largely unknown. Using ...

Wiley2023

Social media and deep learning reveal specific cultural preferences for biodiversity

Devis Tuia

Social media has created new opportunities to map cultural ecosystem services (CES) related to biodiversity at large scales. However, using these novel data to understand people's preferences in relation to these CES remains a challenge. To address this, w ...

2023

A landmark environmental law looks ahead

Devis Tuia

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call “the pitbull of environmental laws.” In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, ob ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2023

Use of an unmanned aerial-aquatic vehicle for acoustic sensing in freshwater ecosystems

Mirko Kovac, Raphael Zufferey

Freshwater ecosystems are endangered, underfunded and understudied, making new methods such as passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data collection. However, many challenges are still to be addressed ...

Wiley2023

Fish Diversity in Relation to Littoral Habitats in Three Basins of Lake Kivu (East Africa)

Alfred Johny Wüest

In total, 28 of the 29 fish species reported from the Lake Kivu basin occur in the littoral zone of the lake, but information about their structure, occurrence, and the habitats affecting their distribution is largely lacking. The lake's inshore area is po ...

MDPI2023

Clogging of riverbed substrates by fine sediment

Romain Maxime Dubuis

Riverbeds represent the habitat of numerous aquatic species. Exchanges between the groundwater, the hyporheic zone and the surface flow are also essential for river ecosystems. Fine sediment transported by rivers deposits inside or on top of the bed and mo ...

EPFL2023

The biofilm ecology of proglacial floodplain streams

Jade Brandani

Glacial forelands figure among the most dynamic landscapes on Earth, and their formation is currently accelerating given glacier shrinkage. Draining these forelands are streams hosting unique microbial communities, which have the capacity to impact both th ...

EPFL2023

High-affinity peptides developed against calprotectin and their application as synthetic ligands in diagnostic assays

Christian Heinis, Florence Pojer, Kelvin Ka Ching Lau, Cristina Diaz Perlas, Lluc Farrera Soler

A peptide was developed that binds to calprotectin, a marker of major inflammatory disorders, and found to be suited for diagnostic tests. The use of synthetic peptides in assays is of great interest due to their high precision, robustness and low price. ...

Nature Portfolio2023

The Reef Environment Centralized InFormation System (RECIFS) : An integrated geo‐environmental database for coral reef research and conservation

Stéphane Joost, Oliver Michele Selmoni

Motivation: Host to intricate networks of marine species, coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. Over the past few decades, major degradations of coral reefs have been observed worldwide, which is largely attributed to the ...

2023

The Role of Hydraulic Failure in a Massive Mangrove Die-Off Event

Alice Jacqueline Frédérique Gauthey

Between late 2015 and early 2016, more than 7,000 ha of mangrove forest died along the coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Australia. This massive die-off was preceded by a strong 2015/2016 El Nino event, resulting in lower precipitation, a d ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Above- and below-ground responses to experimental climate forcing in two forb species from montane wooded pastures in Switzerland

Alexandre Buttler, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov

Mountain ecosystems are particularly threatened by ongoing climate change and the species composition of high elevation grasslands is already changing. An open research question is how these ecosystems will adapt to changes in their key environmental const ...

WILEY2022

Persistence of the isotopic signature of pentavalent uranium in magnetite

Rizlan Bernier-Latmani, Barbora Bártová, Zezhen Pan

Uranium isotopic signatures can be harnessed to monitor the reductive remediation of subsurface contamination or to reconstruct paleo-redox environments. However, the mechanistic underpinnings of the isotope fractionation associated with U reduction remain ...

2022

21 000 birds in 4.5 h: efficient large‐scale seabird detection with machine learning

Devis Tuia, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

We address the task of automatically detecting and counting seabirds in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our study area, the coast of West Africa, harbours significant breeding colonies of terns and gul ...

2021

Both diversity and functional composition affect productivity and water use efficiency in experimental temperate grasslands

Charlotte Grossiord, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency

Many experiments have shown that biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning and stability and that this relationship varies with resource availability. However, we still have a poor understanding of the underlying physiological and ecological mechanisms d ...

WILEY2021

The methylome of the model arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus, Rhizophagus irregularis, shares characteristics with early diverging fungi and Dikarya

Natalia Gasilova, Laure Menin

Early-diverging fungi (EDF) are distinct from Dikarya and other eukaryotes, exhibiting high N6-methyldeoxyadenine (6mA) contents, rather than 5-methylcytosine (5mC). As plants transitioned to land the EDF sub-phylum, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF; Glom ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2021

Kleptoplast distribution, photosynthetic efficiency and sequestration mechanisms in intertidal benthic foraminifera

Anders Meibom, Charlotte Madeleine Nicole Lekieffre, Emmanuelle Geslin, Michael Kühl

Foraminifera are ubiquitously distributed in marine habitats, playing a major role in marine sediment carbon sequestration and the nitrogen cycle. They exhibit a wide diversity of feeding and behavioural strategies (heterotrophy, autotrophy and mixotrophy) ...

SPRINGERNATURE2022

Highly Variable and Non-complex Diazotroph Communities in Corals From Ambient and High CO2 Environments

Nils Rädecker, Gabriela Hannah Holligan Perna

The ecological success of corals depends on their association with microalgae and a diverse bacterial assemblage. Ocean acidification (OA), among other stressors, threatens to impair host-microbial metabolic interactions that underlie coral holobiont funct ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2021