Mount Huangshan Scenic Area, one of the reserves in the IUCN “Green List”

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!

Last week, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced the first “Green List of Protected Areas”. The idea behind this list is to recognize protected areas  all over the World that are successfully meeting their goals. Insofar, the IUCN has evaluated parks in eight countries (Australia, China, Colombia, France, Italy, Kenya, South Korea and Spain) and the list contains 24 reserves.

Khan Academy has a nice tutorial, with videos and texts, on biodiversity and ecosystem services and functioning.

Denis Valle et al. propose a new multivariate model-based approach to analyse and decompose species diversity, in a new paper in Ecology Letters. – Vinicius Bastazini. 

Bird Life International released a report this past week defining over 300 globally threatened regions that are ecologically significant for the conservation of biodiversity. Check out the full report here.

Ever seen the shrimp on a treadmill video? Well, read what the lead researcher behind that internet sensation plans on doing with his contraption.

In stark contrast to the recent chills that afflicted most of the U.S. these past couple of weeks, this summer brought about the warmest global mean sea surface temperatures on record. Mostly influenced by the surprisingly warm North Pacific, these temperatures have been associated with coral bleaching, weakened trade winds, and shifted hurricane tracks. – Nate Johnson

I want to second Nate’s suggestion of reading about the bad-faith abuse and distortion of legitimate science to advance political agendas. It’s not biodiversity per se, but critical to the survival of all scientific disciplines.

Second, those of us on the west coast of the US have been blasted with news items this week about how the virus causing Sea Star Wasting Disease has apparently been identified. You can read about it in the PNAS paper by Hewson et al. that is in early edition. If you want even more exciting news about this story, I also wrote a piece on my own blog about it, with the caveat, based on a talk I saw at a conference this weekend, that the story might ultimately be more complicated than a single virus. But lets be clear, people: it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with radiation from the Fukushima-Daiichi plants. – Emily Grason

A few notables all from Oikos this week. A discussion of neutral stochasticity in ecological communities by M. Vellend and others. A two long-term studies of biodiversity-ecosystem function; one exploring effects of interspecific diversity on below-ground biomass in plant communities and another on intraspecific diversity effects on herbivory in birch tree stands. – Kylla Benes

November 21, 2014