By Nobu Tamura (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

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!

According to a recent analysis of the paleo record of marine fauna in Nature Communications, functional diversity increased much more slowly than was previously hypothesized. Cambrian fauna attempted relatively few new ways of making a living, but functional diversity continued to increase through the Ordovician and following subsequent mass extinctions. (Photo credit Nobu Tamura, via Wikimedia Commons).

Species-area relationships are affected by ecological characteristics of species in Ecology.

What role does maladaptation play in evolutionary ecology? Farkas et al. use island biogeography to develop a framework for including predictions about maladaption in ecological time.

–Emily Grason

An exciting and pioneering  study, led by Andrew Balmford, shows that protected areas (PAs) may be one of the best investments in the World! The study was published last week in PLOS Biology and measures the magnitude of visits to PAs around the Globe.  At total, PAs receive over 8 billion visits/yr and collect approximately US $600 billion/y in direct in-country expenditure and US $250 billion/y in consumer surplus. An older estimative says that we spend less than U$10 billion/y in safeguarding PAs, so if this number still valid, for each dollar spent in maintaining them, we profit ~ U$60. Imagine that this profit is much higher if we take the value of ecosystem services into the equation.

In a recent contribution Marc Manceau and colleagues show that phylogenies support out-of-equilibrium models of biodiversity.

–Vinicius Bastazini

March 6, 2015