PhD candidate Nussaibah Raja-Schoob and Wolfgang Kiessling, with colleagues, published a study on the extinction risk of corals using artificial intelligence. An article is published in 'Global Ecology and Biogeography' and the university has published an interview with N. Raja-Schoob and W. Kiessl...
"Results: Model validation confirmed 77% accuracy in predicting extinction risk of fossil corals. Extinction risk predicted by our model showed a near-random (57%) match with the IUCN conservation status. Our model also suggested that corals in the Least Concern or Near Threatened categories might ...
"Coralline algae that form rhodoliths are widespread globally and their skeletal growth patterns have been used as (paleo-) environmental proxies in a variety of studies. However, growth interruptions (hiati) within their calcareous skeletons are regarded as problematic in this context. Here we inv...
"Abiotic niche lability reduces extinction risk by allowing species to adapt to changing environmental conditions in situ. In contrast, species with static niches must keep pace with the velocity of climate change as they track suitable habitat. The rate and frequency of niche lability have been st...
"Aim: The lockdown of sports infrastructure due to the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially shifted people's physical activity towards public green spaces. With Germany's lockdown as one of the more severe governmentally imposed epidemic-control-decisions, we tested to what extent the frequency of o...
"Islands are among the last regions on Earth settled and transformed by human activities, and they provide replicated model systems for analysis of how people affect ecological functions. By analyzing 27 representative fossil pollen sequences encompassing the past 5000 years from islands globally, ...
"Many ecological and evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient, i.e. the increase in species richness from the poles to the tropics. Among the evolutionary hypotheses, the ‘out of the tropics’ (OTT) hypothesis has received considerable attention. The O...
"Selectivity of mass extinctions is thought to play a major role in coupling or decoupling of taxonomic, morphological, and ecological diversity, yet these measures have never been jointly evaluated within a single clade over multiple mass extinctions. We investigate extinction selectivity and chan...
"Aim: Biological invasions are likely determined by species dispersal strategies as well as environmental characteristics of a recipient region, especially climate and human impact. However, the contribution of climatic factors, human impact, and dispersal strategies in driving invasion processes i...
"Squamates (lizards and snakes) are highly successful modern vertebrates, with over 10 000 species. Squamates have a long history, dating back to at least 240 million years ago (Ma), and showing increasing species richness in the Late Cretaceous (84 Ma) and Early Palaeogene (66-55 Ma). We confirm t...
