David Smyth 🦇🌳

Archived natural DNA samplers reveal four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life - Nature Ecology & Evolution This study explores four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life in Germany’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by sequencing standardized biota samples from a long-term pollution monitoring archive.

!!!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oak living on the ledge at the southern end of Conamara national park today. At 335m, anyone else see oaks at this elevation here?

Would have been done quicker but spent ages waiting to see if any rival stag would turn up!

Heard roars just as I left!

Bonus feature in photo; Those ridges are an indicator of past history of the land and very common in west of Ireland sadly.

Lots of wooded spots with cameras also.

Traipsing the bogs of Conamara for Snapshot Galway!

Year 3 of camera trapping set up - hoping the wind and rain didn't knock them out

Mea cupla

The chiropteran crew would like a word about mammal comment!

There are cases where something like applied nucleation can help - reintroducing local provenance seed to areas or helping the regen process - but not really done in these cases.

In our study, a minority of impact reports (455 out of 2021, Supplementary Data 1) were from areas inside or adjacent to the native continent of the introduced species and thus might have been located in areas formerly inhabited by the species (refugee species concept RSC49). The RSC suggests that species ranges of some LMH may have been drastically reduced over time by humans, and extant populations are currently confined to refuge habitat that might not be optimal50. In accordance with the RSC, introductions near the currently known native range might indicate locations within the historical native ranges of the introduced species but whose relatively recent disappearance led authors of the impact reports we compiled to mistakenly treat them as alien51. It could be hypothesized that the impact magnitude or direction may both vary with their degree of alienness. Therefore, beside our main analysis, we ran an additional analysis with a broader set of predictors, incorporating a binomial predictor designating the introduction location as either “true alien” or “potential reintroduction to former native area” (i.e., on the same continent as the native range, or in cases where the native range, e.g., Northern Africa or Papua New Guinea, borders on an introduction location on a different continent, e.g. Southern Spain, Indonesia in the close vicinity). However, neither this predictor nor its interaction with impact direction improved model fit (relative importance = 0.41 and 0.20, respectively, both well below the threshold of 0.5, included in only 17 and 8 of the 30 selected best-fitting models), and were therefore dropped during the model selection process. This suggests that the uncertainty surrounding the biogeographic status of some introduced populations of LMH has little influence on the observed impact patterns and is therefore unlikely to bias our results.

I was asking @landethics.bsky.social on this a few weeks ago.

Are they looking at biodiversity in a static sense rather than overall wildness/ecological integrity?

Still interested in any expert confirming squirrel and not other rodent/mammal

@irishwoodlandtrust.bsky.social

Baile - Crainnte agus Sceacha Suíomh faoi chrainn agus sceacha in Éirinn

www.crainnte.ie

Great website for anyone interested in Irish ecology and Irish language

Seathrún has done a serious amount of work getting this complete!

Bioacoustics?

Already finished it mate.

(Praying this design works and all detectors come back safely)

amp.rte.ie/amp/1507856/!

To be grown out and put back into local area in a few years

2,000+ inne

Interesting if they made the jump.

There was a hypothesis that high otter numbers in Ireland were stopping mink in areas but I think its been debunked.

Collage of different prints from my online store

Close up of the Irish Aquatic Life print

Linocut print of Men Of The Blaskets, with small flowers beside it

Imbolc print next to purple flowers #speirgorm #speirghorm #art #traditionalart #artist

A cost-of-living crisis isn't the easiest time to sell art, but: www.ciaraioch.com is where you can support my work, with each archival-quality print on textured heavy paper being produced here in Ireland, shipping internationally in eco-friendly packaging, with free mini-treats in every order 🎁

Are rats not more one-sided in chewing?

I was thinking only a squirrel would be dexterous enough to twirl it like an apple core?

Would normally say its a squirrel seeing this in a woodland.

BUT

This is in an isolated woodland complex 20km away from nearest population of reds with treeless landscape between.

Anybody able to shed some light?

In our study, a minority of impact reports (455 out of 2021, Supplementary Data 1) were from areas inside or adjacent to the native continent of the introduced species and thus might have been located in areas formerly inhabited by the species (refugee species concept RSC49). The RSC suggests that species ranges of some LMH may have been drastically reduced over time by humans, and extant populations are currently confined to refuge habitat that might not be optimal50. In accordance with the RSC, introductions near the currently known native range might indicate locations within the historical native ranges of the introduced species but whose relatively recent disappearance led authors of the impact reports we compiled to mistakenly treat them as alien51. It could be hypothesized that the impact magnitude or direction may both vary with their degree of alienness. Therefore, beside our main analysis, we ran an additional analysis with a broader set of predictors, incorporating a binomial predictor designating the introduction location as either “true alien” or “potential reintroduction to former native area” (i.e., on the same continent as the native range, or in cases where the native range, e.g., Northern Africa or Papua New Guinea, borders on an introduction location on a different continent, e.g. Southern Spain, Indonesia in the close vicinity). However, neither this predictor nor its interaction with impact direction improved model fit (relative importance = 0.41 and 0.20, respectively, both well below the threshold of 0.5, included in only 17 and 8 of the 30 selected best-fitting models), and were therefore dropped during the model selection process. This suggests that the uncertainty surrounding the biogeographic status of some introduced populations of LMH has little influence on the observed impact patterns and is therefore unlikely to bias our results.

Can a fieldwork weary PhD student ask if this passage below (and in ALT) potentially answering 2nd part of naturalness/ecological integrity vs biodiversity/metrics?

Would def have hypothesised it to be a predictor before reading passage but now wondering what scale of study areas are (i.e. fences)

Back to life after 50 years: effects of environmental flow restoration on macroinvertebrate biodiversity and river ecological status. A case study of the Valseco stream, Spain The construction of dams and reservoirs to meet increasing water and electricity demands has significantly altered many natural river flows, posing threats to the ecological integrity of freshwater e...

Our new paper shows how a small Iberian stream, dry for 50 years, bounced back to good ecological status in <2 years after environmental flows were restored. 🌊🪱
👉 doi.org/10.1111/rec.70198

#RiverRestoration #EnvironmentalFlows #FreshwaterEcology

A long weekend of slow work digging up regrowth from old stumps and seedlings while getting stung by bees and drenched in the odd downpour at our first site in Corr Uí Mhongáin..... mostly done here but some giant rhubarb will eventually need seeing to

The rain soaking it kept it weighed down!

I was probably carrying a few extra KG with rainwater at this stage

Don't know why its so hard to recruit volunteers these days.....

Snapshot Galway started again yesterday- 20 cameras for 2 months in the windswept valleys!

@irishwoodlandtrust.bsky.social

This woodland is amazing (biased of course)

Perks of the (volunteer) job

The latest copy of the brilliant
@irishwoodlandtrust.bsky.social magazine has arrived, as usual crammed with great articles.

To get active in the fight for Irish nature and forests, you couldn't do better than to join both them and the @irishwildlifetrust.bsky.social.

They're the real thing. 🌎 💪🏽

This was such a fun event, so glad I got to represent the @rhodorangers.bsky.social !

Well done @hetzgonnabeme.bsky.social for organising this new hit in Galway city!