Biology subjects

Eckert, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Eckert, I..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Where Climate Change and Sampling Bias Collide: Challenges of Predicting Biodiversity Change in Canada

Anticipating biodiversity change is critical in rapidly warming regions, yet challenging because these areas often coincide with poor sampling. Data gaps are widely understood to interfere with species distribution models (SDMs), but this is difficult to detect with biased data. We test SDM bias-correction methods with a new occurrence-checklist-range (OCR) validation approach and evaluate prediction discrepancy for [~]700 Canadian terrestrial vertebrate species. We found: 1) bias-correction improves model performance against independent (checklist and range) data, but not against typical occurrence cross-validation, 2) predicted richness differed among methods (up to 2.7-fold), especially in the north, and 3) counterintuitively, future projections varied less (by 28%) because well-sampled climate space will shift north. Our findings suggest potential widespread overconfidence in SDM predictions for the unevenly sampled world, with implications for the growing reliance on biodiversity estimates for planning and policy. OCR validation and methodological discrepancy measurements are relatively easy ways to address this.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

30x30 biodiversity gains rely on national coordination

Protecting 30% of land by 2030 is an invaluable opportunity to combat the ongoing biodiversity crisis, but critical questions remain regarding what biodiversity to prioritize, how to coordinate protection, and how to incorporate global change. Here, we evaluate how well different 30x30 expansion scenarios capture the climatically viable ranges of Canadian terrestrial vertebrates, plants, and butterflies. We find that national coordination protects vastly more biodiversity (65% of species; 40% of species-at-risk) than regional approaches, which safeguard at least 33% fewer species and 75% fewer species-at-risk. Whereas prioritizing different taxa or biodiversity facets (e.g., phylogenetic diversity) incur smaller trade-offs. Surprisingly, national priorities closely match transnational ones, indicating that national coordination could efficiently contribute to global targets while protecting Canadas biodiversity at large.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Discovery of 20 novel ribosomal leaders in bacteria and archaea

BackgroundRNAs perform many functions in addition to supplying coding templates, such as binding proteins. RNA-protein interactions are important in multiple processes in all domains of life, and the discovery of additional protein-binding RNAs expands the scope for studying such interactions. To find such RNAs, we exploited a form of ribosomal regulation. Ribosome biosynthesis must be tightly regulated to ensure that concentrations of rRNAs and ribosomal proteins (r-proteins) match. One regulatory mechanism is a ribosomal leader (r-leader), which is a domain in the 5' UTR of an mRNA whose genes encode r-proteins. When the concentration of one of these r-proteins is high, the protein binds the r-leader in its own mRNA, reducing gene expression and thus protein concentrations. To date, 35 types of r-leaders have been validated or predicted. ResultsBy analyzing additional conserved RNA structures on a multi-genome scale, we identified 20 novel r-leader structures. Surprisingly, these included new r-leaders in the highly studied organisms Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. Our results reveal several cases where multiple unrelated RNA structures likely bind the same r-protein ligand, and uncover previously unknown r-protein ligands. Each r-leader consistently occurs upstream of r-protein genes, suggesting a regulatory function. That the predicted r-leaders function as RNAs is supported by evolutionary correlations in the nucleotide sequences that are characteristic of a conserved RNA secondary structure. The r-leader predictions are also consistent with the locations of experimentally determined transcription start sites. ConclusionsThis work increases the number of known or predicted r-leader structures by more than 50%, providing additional opportunities to study structural and evolutionary aspects of RNA-protein interactions. These results provide a starting point for detailed experimental studies.

bioinformatics↗