New Paper: Biodiversity Change & Human Impacts in the Sea

Work in our ocean biodiversity change class and working group is beginning to bear fruit! This Elahi et al. piece looks at timeseries of biodiversity in oceans around the world and finds that in areas of high human impact we are more likely to lose species. However, a number of ecological drivers appear to be influencing biodiversity change over time. That, and our oceans are woefully undersampled to detect true biodiversity change. There’s a lot of nuance and food for thought packed into this piece, so check it out!

See also our code and data repository on Github

Elahi, R., O’Connor, M.I., Byrnes, J.E.K., Dunic, J., Eriksson, B.K., Hensel, M.J.S., Kearns, P.J. 2015. Recent Trends in Local-Scale Marine Biodiversity Reflect Community Structure and Human Impacts. Current Biology. 25: 1938–1943. [doi]