Environmental controls on butterfly occurrence and species richness in Israel: The importance of temperature over rainfall

Butterflies are considered important indicators representing the state of biodiversity and key ecosystem functions, but their use as bioindicators requires a better understanding of how their observed response is linked to environmental factors. Moreover, better understanding how butterfly faunas vary with climate and land cover may be useful to estimate the potential impacts of various drivers, including climate change, botanical succession, grazing, and afforestation. It is particularly important to establish which species of butterflies are sensitive to each environmental driver. The study took place in Israel, including the West Bank and Golan Heights. To develop a robust and systematic approach for identifying how butterfly faunas vary with the environment, we analyzed the occurrence of 73 species and the abundance of 24 species from Israeli Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (BMS-IL) data. We used regional generalized additive models to quantify butterfly abundance, and generalized linear latent variable models and generalized linear models to quantify the impact of temperature, rainfall, soil type, and habitat on individual species and on the species community. Species richness was higher for cooler transects, and also for hilly and mountainous transects in the Mediterranean region (rendzina and Terra rossa soils) compared with the coastal plain (Hamra soil) and semiarid northern Jordan Vale (loessial sierozem soil). Species occurrence was better explained by temperature (negative correlation) than precipitation, while for abundance the opposite pattern was found. Soil type and habitat were insignificant drivers of occurrence and abundance. Butterfly faunas responded very strongly to temperature, even when accounting for other environmental factors. We expect that some butterfly species will disappear from marginal sites with global warming, and a large proportion will become rarer as the region becomes increasingly arid.

The Moderating Role of Ethical Leadership on Nurses' Green Behavior Intentions and Real Green Behavior

Aim

This study is aimed at exploring the relationship between green behavior intentions and green behavior and analyzing the moderating role of ethical leadership in this relationship.

Background

Nurses' green behavior can directly reduce costs and protect the natural environment and organizational sustainability by saving resources and energy. It is not clear how green behavior intention affects green behavior or how the positive influence of green behavior intention on green behavior can be enhanced. Design and Methods. This is a cross-sectional study, and the surveys are collected from 3 hospitals in China. Of the initial cohort of 489 nurses, 89.6% were female. There were 327 subjects (66.9%) aged 35 or less, 267 subjects (54.6%) with 10 years or less of work experience, and 220 unmarried subjects (44.9%). Data were collected from January to July 2018, using three surveys: green behavior intentions, green behavior, and ethical leadership.

Results

Green behavior intentions impacted employee green behavior (b = 0.32, t = 5.37, p < 0.01). The interaction term for green behavior intentions and ethical leadership was significant (b = 0.28, t = 2.53, p ≤ 0.01); the conditional direct effect of green behavior intentions was only significant at a high level of ethical leadership (conditional effect = 0.53, SE = 0.16, t = 3.38, p < 0.01, 95% confidence interval of 0.22-0.84).

Conclusion

The intention to engage in green behavior influences nurses' green behavior positively, and the relationship is stronger when ethical leadership is high in the organization than when ethical leadership is low. The results of this study can help both academics and practitioners to understand the micromechanism of environmentally sustainable development in more detail and to identify the mechanisms and boundary conditions of green behavioral intentions, green behavior, and ethical leadership.

Climatic and vegetational drivers of insect beta diversity at the continental scale

AIM

We construct a framework for mapping pattern and drivers of insect diversity at the continental scale and use it to test whether and which environmental gradients drive insect beta diversity.

LOCATION

Global; North and Central America; Western Europe.

TIME PERIOD

21st century.

MAJOR TAXA STUDIED

Insects.

METHODS

An informatics system was developed to integrate terrestrial data on insects with environmental parameters. We mined repositories of data for distribution, climatic data were retrieved (WorldClim), and vegetation parameters inferred from remote sensing analysis (MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields). Beta diversity between sites was calculated and then modeled with two methods, Mantel test with multiple regression and generalized dissimilarity modeling.

RESULTS

Geographic distance was the main driver of insect beta diversity. Independent of geographic distance, bioclimate variables explained more variance in dissimilarity than vegetation variables, although the particular variables found to be significant were more consistent in the latter, particularly, tree cover. Tree cover gradients drove compositional dissimilarity at denser coverages, in both continental case studies. For climate, gradients in temperature parameters were significant in driving beta diversity more so than gradients in precipitation parameters.

MAIN CONCLUSIONS

Although environmental gradients drive insect beta diversity independently of geography, the relative contribution of different climatic and vegetational parameters is not expected to be consistent in different study systems. With further incorporation of additional temporal information and variables, this approach will enable the development of a predictive framework for conserving insect biodiversity at the global scale.

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)-has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity.

Can siting algorithms assist in prioritizing for conservation in a densely populated and land use allocated country? – Israel as a case study

Over the years, Israel's centralized national planning framework and the intense competition on the limited available land played a crucial factor in designing the spatial distribution of the protected areas in Israel. When examining the spatial properties of the protected areas, it was found that they do not adequately represent the variety of the ecosystems in Israel. According to the systematic conservation planning approach, we aimed to examine how optimization algorithms (e.g., MARXAN) would inform us on high priority areas for conservation. We created proxies for anthropogenic disturbance, and for the susceptibility of designating new protected areas subject to existing national and regional land use master plans. Our conservation targets were defined on the basis of the spatial distribution of 461 endangered vertebrate and plant species (red species), as well as by defining and mapping 21 main ecosystems. The results highlight the limited options of significantly improving the representativeness provided by the existing protected areas, due to the diminishing availability of open areas, which may be available to be designated as protected areas. However, the results also emphasize the conservation potential of agricultural land, as well as the need for preserving small and fragmented rare habitats.

Integrating landscape disturbance and indicator species in conservation studies

Successful conservation plans are conditioned by our ability to detect anthropogenic change in space and time and various statistical analyses have been developed to handle this critical issue. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate a new approach for spatial analysis in conservation biology. Here, we propose a two-step protocol. First, we introduce a new disturbance metric which provides a continuous measure of disturbance for any focal communities on the basis of the surrounding landscape matrix. Second, we use this new gradient to estimate species and community disturbance thresholds by implementing a recently developed method called Threshold Indicator Taxa ANalysis (TITAN). TITAN detects changes in species distributions along environmental gradients using indicators species analysis and assesses synchrony among species change points as evidence for community thresholds. We demonstrate our method with soil arthropod assemblages along a disturbance gradient in Terceira Island (Azores, Portugal). We show that our new disturbance metric realistically reflects disturbance patterns, especially in buffer zones (ecotones) between land use categories. By estimating species disturbance thresholds with TITAN along the disturbance gradient in Terceira, we show that species significantly associated with low disturbance differ from those associated with high disturbance in their biogeographical origin (endemics, non-endemic natives and exotics) and taxonomy (order). Finally, we suggest that mapping the disturbance community thresholds may reveal areas of primary interest for conservation, since these may host indigenous species sensitive to high disturbance levels. This new framework may be useful when: (1) both local and regional processes are to be reflected on single disturbance measures; (2) these are better quantified in a continuous gradient; (3) mapping disturbance of large regions using fine scales is necessary; (4) indicator species for disturbance are searched for and; (5) community thresholds are useful to understand the global dynamics of habitats.