A reintroduced wolf in Yellowstone (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wolves_in_Yellowstone)

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

Emily just wrote a really cool piece on the importance of social media as a source of biodiversity data. So here is a paper that might help you to analyze this sort of “opportunistic”, unplanned, data in conjunction with data obtained from standard surveys, using hierarchical models.

Marti Anderson and colleagues propose a new method for assessing sample-size adequacy for multivariate data, when using dissimilarity-based analyses, in their new paper “Measures of precision for dissimilarity-based multivariate analysis of ecological communities”.

Marcos C. Vieira and Mário Almeida-Neto developed a new stochastic model for simulating complex extinction cascades, in their paper “A simple stochastic model for complex coextinctions in mutualistic networks: robustness decreases with connectance”. Their results show that traditional topological models are likely to misestimate co-extinctions and that highly connected mutualistic networks are more likely to undergo extinction cascades.

A new study published by Robert B. Wielgus and Kaylie A. Peebles shows that lethal wolf control in not an effective measure to protect livestock; on the contrary, it may actually lead to an increase in the number of dead livestock! Using data collected for more than two decades in the USA, they show that the number of livestock depredated the following year increased with the number of wolves killed the  year before, and that the odds of livestock depredations increases with increased wolf control (4% for sheep and 5–6% for cattle).

James T. Stroud and Kenneth J. Feeley show how academia can minimize greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing conference locations, in a paper recently published in Ecography (you can also see a review of this paper on the Ecography blog here).

At last, here is a nice theoretical physicist’s view on biology.  – Vinicius Bastazini

Welcome to the dark side… of diversity. If you haven’t heard of Partels ‘dark diversity’, the basic idea is to look at the species that could be in a community (based on their habitat preferences), but aren’t. Seems like a neat idea, especially, say, when thinking about ecologcal processes that exclude species (e.g. dispersal limitation, predation, competition,… um…actually just about any process except facilitation). Check out the groups’ most recent paper out this week in Ecography that looks at what’s missing (a lot!) and why (traits?) from over 1000 European grassland plots. -Jes Coyle

December 5, 2014