Biology subjects

Berti, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Berti, E..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Forest degradation reshapes trophic functioning in vertebrate food webs across Amazonian forests

The Amazon is a mosaic of ecosystems, accounting for 13% of all known species globally, and responsible for providing a variety of ecosystem services, including a key role in global climate regulation. However, 18% of the Amazon forest cover has been lost completely and a further 38% degraded, threatening biodiversity and millions of local livelihoods. Currently, little is known about how this impacts the functioning of ecological communities. Here, we combine an energetic approach with biodiversity metrics to quantify ecosystem functioning in mammal and bird food webs across Amazonia, along a gradient of forest degradation linked to road proximity. We show that even under relatively low disturbance, ecosystem functions shift: carnivory increases closer to roads, driven by generalist species that persist under these conditions, whereas herbivory declines mainly due to reduced herbivore biomass and species richness. This suggests that processes associated with forest degradation can alter energy flow even where biodiversity metrics remain relatively unchanged, highlighting energetic approaches as sensitive indicators of ecosystem disruption.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2026

The Hidden Costs of Climate Change Tracking: Climate Velocity, Movement Energetics, and Connectivity in European Protected Areas

Rapid climate change is reducing the capacity of protected areas (PAs) to conserve biodiversity, but exposure metrics alone do not show whether species can reach areas where suitable climates persist. We developed a climate-informed connectivity framework integrating climate velocity, PA climatic residence time, PA size, and functional connectivity based on energetics-informed resistance surfaces from species distribution models. Using high-resolution climate projections and omnidirectional connectivity modelling across Europe, we show that climate-tracking opportunities are more limited and spatially uneven than structural connectivity alone suggests. Small, climate-exposed PAs are especially vulnerable because they provide little internal climatic buffering and are often embedded in landscapes with low movement feasibility, whereas larger and more climatically stable PAs are more often situated in landscapes that can support redistribution. These findings provide a spatially explicit basis for restoration and conservation planning to maintain the functionality of PA networks under future climate change. TeaserMany European protected areas are too isolated, climate-exposed, and energy-constrained to support climate-tracking connectivity.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

MacroMove: a global database of animal movement across taxa and movement types

Animal movement is a key ecological process that shapes species distributions and interactions and connects resources, populations and habitats, underpinning ecosystem functioning and stability. While foraging, dispersal, and migration are the most widely studied movement types, they operate at distinct spatial and temporal scales, and no single resource currently integrates these processes across taxa, traits, and ecosystems. We present MacroMove, a comprehensive global movement database containing 92,207 observations from 4,329 (4,167 using GBIF backbone) species, spanning 36 classes and 648 families across 205 countries, with data sourced from 6,234 references and 36 meta-analyses/databases. It includes both vertebrates and invertebrates from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. The database includes various movement metrics - home range area, dispersal distance, migration distance, day range, routine speed and maximum speed - including summary statistics (e.g. mean, median, maximum) where available. Records are reported at individual, population, or species levels and include standardised metadata describing species identity (binomial name, class, family), research methods (e.g. sampling method, sampling level and sampling dates) and location (e.g. country, location and coordinates). The dataset was assembled from published meta-analyses/databases and original studies included in these meta-analyses. Trait information (body mass and locomotion mode) from original studies and associated metadata was incorporated, with additional data sourced from established trait databases and reputable online resources. In the final dataset, body mass is available for 98 % and locomotion for 100% of species. Taxonomy was harmonised using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) backbone taxonomy. The database is supplied in comma-delimited text (.csv) format to maximise accessibility and compatibility with a wide range of workflows. By consolidating existing movement data into a single, standardised and openly accessible resource, MacroMove fills a major gap in available biodiversity data. It serves as a practical and extensible foundation for synthesising movement information across taxa and ecosystems, advancing data-driven research on the ecological and evolutionary correlates of animal movement.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

The impacts of climate variability on the niche concept and distributions of species

1Ecological demographers know that year-to-year climate variability influences the long-term growth of populations and thus their viability. Despite this, species distribution models (SDMs), widely used to project species geographic distributions based on climate, typically ignore inter-annual climate variability. Here, we show that climate variability plays a crucial role in determining current and future distributions of species. We achieved this by developing a new SDM framework, XSDM, that accounts for variability when assessing the ecological niche and distribution of species. XSDM outperforms traditional SDMs in simulation studies. Using XSDM, we assessed the impacts of variability on 10 example species. Variability reduces species potential distributions by an average of 22%, up to 45%. Moreover, sensitivities of distributions to potential changes in average temperature and in its variability were comparable in magnitude. To avoid biases, future SDMs should consider the effects of variability through a demographic approach such as XSDM. As global change alters climate variability, e.g., through increased frequency of extreme events, XSDM provides better tools for countering biodiversity losses.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Heat dissipation drives the hump-shaped scaling of animal dispersal speed with body mass

Dispersal is critical to animal survival and thus biodiversity in fragmented landscapes. Increasing fragmentation in the Anthropocene necessitates predictions about the dispersal capabilities of the many species that inhabit natural ecosystems. This requires mechanistic, trait-based models of animal dispersal which are sufficiently general as well as biologically realistic. While larger animals should generally be able to travel greater distances, reported trends in their speeds across a range of body sizes suggest limited locomotor capacities among the largest species. Here, we show that this also applies to dispersal speeds and that this arises because of their limited heat-dissipation capacities. We derive a model considering how fundamental biophysical constraints of animal body mass associated with energy utilisation (i.e. larger animals have a lower metabolic energy cost of locomotion) and heat-dissipation (i.e. larger animals require more time to dissipate metabolic heat) limit sustained (i.e. aerobic) dispersal speeds. Using an extensive empirical dataset of animal dispersal speeds (531 species), we show that this allometric heat-dissipation model best captures the hump-shaped trends in dispersal speed with body mass for flying, running and swimming animals. This implies that the inability to dissipate metabolic heat leads to the saturation and eventual decrease in dispersal speed with increasing body mass as larger animals must reduce their realised dispersal speeds in order to avoid hyperthermia during extended dispersal bouts. As a result, the highest dispersal speeds are achieved by animals of intermediate body mass, whereas the largest species might suffer from stronger dispersal limitations in fragmented landscapes than previously anticipated. Consequently, we provide a mechanistic understanding of animal dispersal speed that can be generalised across species, even when the details of an individual species biology are unknown, to facilitate more realistic predictions of biodiversity dynamics in fragmented landscapes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Identifying the potential for sustainable human wildlife coexistence by integrating willingness to coexist with habitat suitability models

Persistence of large mammals in the Anthropocene depends on human willingness to coexist with them, but this is rarely incorporated into habitat suitability or conservation priority assessments. We propose a framework that integrates human willingness-to-coexist with habitat suitability assessments to identify areas of high potential for sustainable coexistence. We demonstrate its applicability for elephants and rhinos in the socio-ecological system of Maasai Mara, Kenya, by integrating spatial distributions of peoples willingness-to-coexist based on Bayesian hierarchical models using 556 household interviews, with socio-ecological habitat suitability mapping validated with long-term elephant observations from aerial surveys. Willingness-to-coexist was higher if people had little personal experience with a species, and strongly reduced by experiencing a species as a threat to humans. The sustainable coexistence potential framework highlights areas of low socio-ecological suitability, and areas that require more effort to increase positive stakeholder engagement to achieve long-term persistence of large herbivores in human-dominated landscapes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

ATNr : Allometric trophic models in R

O_LIUnderstanding and predicting how densities of interacting species change over time has been one of the main goals of community ecology, which has become a pressing challenge in the context of global change. C_LIO_LIWe present the R package ATNr, which provides an implementation of different versions of Allometric Trophic Network models (Yodzis and Innes (1992)) that simulate the biomass dynamics of trophically interacting species. C_LIO_LIRelying on C++ routines, the ATNr proposes an efficient and standardized implementation of the different ATNs models. C_LIO_LIBy proposing a set of built in functions ready to use in a language widely used in the community of ecologists, the ATNr package offers an easy access to ATN models. C_LI

ecology↗