Biology subjects

Bonn, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Bonn, A..

10 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Using nature-based citizen science initiatives to enhance nature connection and mental health.

The global rise in mental health issues underscores the critical importance of assessing the mental health benefits of engaging with nature. Beyond their primary aim of involving citizens in scientific data collection, nature-based citizen science initiatives offer significant potential for enhancing conservation (e.g. connection to nature) and human health and wellbeing (e.g. emotions, depression, stress, anxiety) outcomes. However, the effectiveness of various types of initiatives in achieving specific health outcomes remain unclear. This study evaluates changes in eight nature connection and health and wellbeing outcomes before and after participation in five such initiatives, specifically three dimensions of connection to nature (Self, Experience and Perspective) measured by the Nature Relatedness scale), and mental health outcomes--depression, stress and anxiety--measured by the DASS-21 scale; along with positive and negative emotions assessed using the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE). We found that participants generally reported improvements across all outcomes, but only positive emotions and reduced anxiety and stress symptoms were significantly enhanced. This suggests that short-term nature-based interventions are effective in boosting emotions and alleviating anxiety and stress, though significant changes in nature connection and depression may require prolonged or more intensive engagement. We also found that the Queensland Trust for Nature initiative, characterized by its extended duration and social interactions, emerged as a particularly effective model in achieving synergies between biodiversity and human health goals. Consequently, we advocate for the reimagining of these nature-based initiatives as integral components of broader health-promoting strategies. By aligning citizen science efforts with health promotion frameworks, we can amplify the utility and impact of nature-based citizen science initiatives, enhancing their contributions to scientific knowledge, nature conservation and human health.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Perceived biodiversity: is what we measure also what we see and hear?

1. Biodiversity is crucial for human health and well-being. Perceived biodiversity - peoples subjective experience of biodiversity - seems to be particularly relevant for mental well-being. 2. Using photographs and audio recordings of forests that varied in levels of species richness, we conducted two sorting studies to assess how people perceive visual and acoustic diversity and whether their perceptions align with measured tree and bird species richness ( actual diversity). Per study, 48 participants were asked to sort the stimuli according to any similarity-based sorting criteria they liked ( open sorts) and perceived diversity ( closed sorts). 3. The main perceived visual forest characteristics identified by participants in the open visual sorts were vegetation density, light conditions, forest structural attributes and colours. The main perceived acoustic forest characteristics identified in the open acoustic sorts comprised bird song characteristics, physical properties such as volume, references to the time of day or seasonality and evoked emotions. 4. Perceived visual and acoustic diversity were significantly correlated with actual tree and bird species richness, respectively. Notably, the relationship was twice as strong for the acoustic sense. The acoustic sense may thus be crucial to obtain a more thorough understanding of perceived biodiversity. 5. We further computed several visual and acoustic diversity indices from the photos and audio recordings, e.g. colourfulness or acoustic complexity, and assessed their relevance for perceived and actual diversity. While all acoustic diversity indices were significantly associated with perceived acoustic diversity and bird richness, we could not identify a visual diversity index that captured perceived visual diversity and tree richness. 6. Our results suggest that people can perceive species richness. Our identified visual and acoustic forest characteristics may help to better understand perceived diversity and how it differs from actual diversity. We present acoustic diversity indices that quantify aspects of perceived and actual acoustic diversity. These indices may serve as cost-efficient tools to manage and plan greenspaces to promote biodiversity and mental well-being.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

The majority of Germany's small agricultural streams are in poor ecological status

Agricultural pesticides, nutrients, and habitat degradation are major causes of insect declines in lowland streams. To effectively conserve and restore stream habitats, standardized stream monitoring data and societal support for freshwater protection are needed. Here, we sampled 137 small stream sites across Germany, 83% of which were located in agricultural catchments, with more than 900 citizen scientists in 96 monitoring groups. Sampling was carried out according to Water Framework Directive standards as part of the citizen science freshwater monitoring program FLOW in spring and summer 2021, 2022 and 2023. The biological indicator SPEARpesticides was used to assess pesticide exposure and effects based on benthic invertebrate community composition. Overall, 58% of the monitored agricultural stream sites did not achieve a good ecological status in terms of macroinvertebrate community composition and indicated high pesticide exposure (SPEARpesticides status class: 29% moderate, 19% poor, 11% bad). The indicated pesticide pressure in streams was related to the proportion of agricultural land in the catchment area (R2=0.23, p<0.001). With regards to hydromorphology, monitoring results revealed that 65% of the agricultural stream sites failed to reach a good status. The data base produced by citizen science groups was characterized by a high degree of accuracy. This was quantified by a comparative survey of SPEARpesticides index (R2=0.79, p<0.001) and hydromorphology index values (R2=0.72, p<0.001) by citizen scientists and professionals. Such citizen-driven monitoring of the status of watercourses could play a crucial role in monitoring and implementing the objective of the European Water Framework Directive, thus contributing to restoring and protecting freshwater ecosystems. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=82 SRC="FIGDIR/small/564349v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (28K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1bbc51aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@896431org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@10e0bborg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@121819_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG Highlights- Assessment of ecological status of small agricultural streams in Germany - Pesticides affected invertebrates (bioindicator SPEAR) in 58% of agricultural streams - Failure to reach good hydromorphological status in 65% of agricultural streams - Citizen science monitoring achieves high data accuracy - Citizen science can support European Water Framework Directive monitoring

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Biodiversity monitoring in Europe: user and policy needs

To implement the goals of the 2030 Global Biodiversity Framework, the European Biodiversity Strategy and the EU Green Deal, biodiversity monitoring is a pivotal instrument to achieve accountability and progress in conservation. Monitoring efforts in Europe, however, suffer from gaps and biases in taxonomy, spatial coverage, and temporal resolution, resulting in fragmented and disconnected data which does not provide sufficient evidence for policy making. To assess user and policy needs in biodiversity monitoring, we employed with EuropaBON a four-step user-centred stakeholder engagement process, including an international public stakeholder workshop, a standardised online survey, semi-structured interviews, and an expert meeting with representatives of EU member states, the European Commission and the European Environment Agency. The resulting insights into national and European biodiversity monitoring schemes identify policy needs, current challenges and potential solutions. Based on this in-depth policy and science stakeholder assessment, we recommend the establishment of a European Biodiversity Observation Network through a permanent Biodiversity Monitoring and Coordinating Centre to optimise existing observation efforts, harmonise data, and enhance our ability to predict and respond to key challenges related to biodiversity loss in a changing climate in Europe.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Contrasting impacts of urban and farmland cover on flying insect biomass

Recent studies report declines in biomass, abundance and diversity of terrestrial insect groups. While anthropogenic land use is one likely contributor to this decline, studies assessing land cover as a driver of insect dynamics are rare and mostly restricted in spatial scale and types of land cover. In this study, we used rooftop-mounted car nets in a citizen science project ( InsectMobile) to allow for large-scale geographic sampling of flying insects across Denmark and parts of Germany. Citizen scientists sampled insects along 278 10 km routes in urban, farmland and semi-natural (grassland, wetland and forest) landscapes in the summer of 2018. We assessed the importance of local to landscape-scale effects and land use intensity by relating insect biomass to land cover in buffers of 50, 250, 500 and 1000 m along the routes. We found a negative association of urban cover and a positive association of farmland on insect biomass at a landscape-scale (1000 m buffer) in both countries. In Denmark, we also found positive effects of all semi-natural land covers, i.e. grassland (largest at the landscape-scale, 1000 m), forests (largest at intermediate scales, 250 m), and wetlands (largest at the local-scale, 50 m). The negative association of insect biomass with urban land cover and positive association with farmland were not clearly modified by any variable associated with land use intensity. Our results show that land cover has an impact on flying insect biomass with the magnitude of this effect varying across spatial scales. Since we consistently found negative effects of urban land cover, our findings highlight the need for the conservation of semi-natural areas, such as wetlands, grasslands and forests, in Europe.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Widespread decline in plant diversity across six decades

Based on plant occurrence data covering all parts of Germany, we investigated changes in the distribution of 2146 plant species between 1960 and 2017. We analyzed 29 million occurrence records over an area of [~]350.000 km2 on a 5 x 5 km grid using temporal and spatio-temporal models and accounting for sampling bias. Since the 1960s, more than 70% of investigated plant species showed significant declines in nation-wide occurrence. Archaeophytes (species introduced before 1492) most strongly declined but also native plant species experienced severe declines. In contrast, neophytes (species introduced after 1492) increased in their nation-wide occurrence but not homogeneously throughout the country. Our analysis suggests that the strongest declines in native species already happened in the 1960s-80s, a time frame in which usually few data exist. Increases in neophytic species were strongest in the 1990s and 2010s. Overall, the increase in neophytes did not compensate for the loss of other species, resulting in a decrease in mean grid-cell species-richness of -1.9% per decade. The decline in plant biodiversity is a widespread phenomenon occurring in different habitats and geographic regions. It is likely that this decline has major repercussions on ecosystem functioning and overall biodiversity, potentially with cascading effects across trophic levels. The approach used in this study is transferable to large-scale trend analyses using heterogeneous occurrence data.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Winners and losers over 35 years of dragonfly and damselfly distributional change in Germany

Recent studies suggest insect declines in parts of Europe; however, the generality of these trends across different taxa and regions remains unclear. Standardized data are not available to assess large-scale, long-term changes for most insect groups but opportunistic citizen science data is widespread for some taxa. We compiled over 1 million occurrence records of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) from different regional databases across Germany. We used occupancy-detection models to estimate annual distributional changes between 1980 and 2016 for each species. We related species attributes to changes in the species distributions and inferred possible drivers of change. Species showing increases were generally warm-adapted species and/or running water species while species showing decreases were cold-adapted species using standing water habitats such as bogs. We developed a novel approach using time-series clustering to identify groups of species with similar patterns of temporal change. Using this method, we defined five typical patterns of change for Odonata - each associated with a specific combination of species attributes. Overall, trends in Odonata provide mixed news - improved water quality, coupled with positive impacts of climate change, could explain the positive trend status of many species. At the same time, declining species point to conservation challenges associated with habitat loss and degradation. Our study demonstrates the great value of citizen science data for assessing large-scale distributional change and conservation decision-making.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Resilience trinity: safeguarding ecosystem services across three different time horizons and decision contexts

Ensuring ecosystem resilience is an intuitive approach to safeguard future provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). However, resilience is an ambiguous concept and difficult to operationalize. Focusing on resilience mechanisms, such as diversity, network architectures or adaptive capacity, has recently been suggested as means to operationalize resilience. Still, the focus on mechanisms is not specific enough because the usefulness of a mechanism is context-dependent. We suggest a conceptual framework, resilience trinity, to facilitate management of resilience mechanisms in three distinctive decision contexts and time-horizons. i) reactive, when there is an imminent threat to ES resilience and a high pressure to act, ii) adjustive, when the threat is known in general but there is still time to adapt management, and iii) provident when time horizons are very long and the nature of the threats is uncertain, leading to a low willingness to act. This emphasizes that resilience has different interpretations and implications at different time horizons which however need to be reconciled. The inclusion of time into resilience thinking ensures that longer-term management actions are not missed while urgent threats to ES are given priority.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Finding the signal in the noise of Citizen Science Observations

While many observations of species are being collected by citizen science projects worldwide, it can be challenging to identify projects collecting data that effectively monitor biodiversity. Over the past several years the allure of taking a \"Big Data\" approach has provided the opportunity to gather massive quantities of observations via the Internet, too often with insufficient information to describe how the observations were made. Information about species populations -- where and when they occur and how many of them are there -- (i.e., the signal) can be lost because insufficient information is gathered to account for the inherent biases in data collection (i.e., the noise). Here we suggest that citizen science projects that have succeeded in motivating large numbers of participants, must consider factors that influence the ecological process that affect species populations as well as the observation process that determines how observations are made. Those citizen science projects that collect sufficient contextual information describing the observation process can be used to generate increasingly accurate information about the distribution and abundance of organisms. We illustrate this using eBird as a case study, describing how this citizen science platform is able to collect vital contextual information on the observation process while maintaining a broad global constituency of participants. We highlight how eBird provides information with which to generate biodiversity indicators -- specifically distribution, abundance, and habitat associations -- across the entire annual cycle, even for populations of long distance migratory birds, a highly challenging taxon.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Social licence through citizen science: A tool for marine conservation

1. Introduction 1. Introduction 2. Methods 3. Results Discussion 4. Conclusion References Meaningful public engagement with science and research is essential to improving knowledge about the environment and supporting sustainable use of ecosystems and natural resources. Transparent and culturally-appropriate natural resource management is imperative (Christie et al. 2017) and the publics role in decision-making and data collection is increasingly recognised (Hecker et al. 2018), supported by a rise in the number of citizen science projects in recent years (Chandler et al. 2017;Pocock et al. 2017), including marine-based projects (Cigliano and Ballard 2017). In parallel, social licence has become an important theme for development, pa ...

scientific communication and education↗