Revisiting Daniels et al. 1992

In a paper published in PNAS in 1992, RJ Ranjit Daniels, NV Joshi and Madhav Gadgil reported that bird richness declined with increasing woody plant diversity and vertical stratification in natural evergreen forests in Uttara Kannada district of the Western Ghats, India - a pattern that ran counter to what was generally believed at that …

Revisiting Chapin 2004

In an article published in World Watch magazine in 2004, Mac Chapin critiqued the work and style of functioning of three big conservation NGOS -- World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) -- , especially in relation to their neglect of indigenous peoples living within their areas of work. Based …

Revisiting Pauly et al. 1998

In a paper published in Science in 1998, Daniel Pauly, Villy Christensen, Johanne Dalsgaard, Rainer Froese and Francisco Torres Jr., using the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO's) global fisheries catch data, showed that the mean trophic level had declined over the period of 1950 to 1994. In other words, fisheries, over this period, was moving …

Revisiting Şekercioğlu et al. 2002

In a paper published in PNAS in 2002, Çağan Şekercioğlu, Paul Ehrlich, Gretchen Daily, Deniz Aygen, David Goehring and Randi Sandi showed. using data from forest fragments in Costa Rica, that the ability to move through the deforested matrix was the best predictor of persistence of understory insectivorous birds in small forest fragments. Bird diets, …

Revisiting Likens et al. 1970

In a study published in Ecological Monographs in 1970, Gene Likens, F. Herbert Bormann, Noye Johnson, Don Fisher and Robert Pierce compared nutrient budgets between a control forested catchment and a catchment that was deforested and regrowth prevented for two years through the application of herbicide. Likens and colleagues demonstrated that this manipulation caused changes …

Revisiting Ostrom & Nagendra 2006

In a paper published in PNAS in 2006, Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra synthesized the findings of a long-term research program aimed at understanding how institutional factors affect forests managed under different kinds of tenure. Bringing together satellite images, socio-ecological studies in the field, and laboratory experiments of human behaviour, Ostrom and Nagendra showed that …

Revisiting Soule 1985

In a paper published in Bioscience in 1985, Michael Soule laid out his vision for a new discipline called Conservation Biology to "provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity". Soule envisioned Conservation Biology as a "crisis discipline" in which "one must act before knowing all the facts", using a "mixture of science and art", …

Revisiting Stachowicz et al. 1999

In a paper published in Science in 1999, Jay Stachowicz, Robert Whitlach and Richard Osman showed, using experimental communities of sessile marine invertebrates that invasion success was lower in more species rich communities. The like reason for this pattern was that space, which was the limiting resource in the system, was more fully and efficiently …

Revisiting Carvalho & Vasconcelos 1999

In a paper published in Biological Conservation in 1999, Karine Carvalho and Heraldo Vasconcelos examined the effects of forest fragmentation on litter-dwelling ants in Central Amazonia. Their results suggested that litter ant communities were structured both by edge and isolation effects in these fragments. Twenty-one years after the paper was published, I asked Karine Carvalho …

Revisiting Coulson et al. 2001

In a paper published in Science in 2001, Tim Coulson, Edward Catchpole, Steve Albon, Byron Morgan, Josephine Pemberton, Tim Clutton-Brock, Mick Crawley, and Bryan Grenfell examined the effect of density, climate and demography on population fluctuations in Soay sheep on the St. Kilda islands in the United Kingdom. Coulson and colleagues' found that age and …