W. J. Sutherland

Assessing the global prevalence of wild birds in trade

This paper quantifies global bird trade prevalence using seven datasets, identifying species at risk and informing conservation strategies.

Impacts of dams on freshwater turtles: a global review to identify conservation solutions

This paper reviews global studies on dam impacts on freshwater turtles and finds limited evidence on effective mitigation strategies, emphasizing the need for more research, especially in tropical regions.

Reducing publication delay to improve the efficiency and impact of conservation science

This study analyzes publication delays in conservation science, finding a mean delay of 3.6 years and suggesting ways to improve the speed of scientific dissemination.

The data-index: an author-level metric that values impactful data and incentivises data sharing

The paper introduces the data-index, an author-level metric that prioritizes data generation and sharing to address limitations in traditional metrics like the h-index.

Dynamic meta-analysis: a method of using global evidence for local decision making

The paper introduces dynamic meta-analysis to enable local decision-making using global evidence, demonstrating its application in agroecology with the Metadataset tool.

Poor availability of context-specific evidence hampers decision-making in conservation

The paper assesses the availability of context-specific evidence for amphibian and bird conservation, finding it extremely low and unevenly distributed.

The challenge of heterogeneous evidence in conservation

This paper assesses biases and gaps in conservation literature for amphibians and birds, highlighting geographic and taxonomic disparities in study coverage and effectiveness metrics.

Responses of global waterbird populations to climate change vary with latitude

This study quantifies how waterbird abundance responds to climate change across latitudes, finding declines in the tropics and increases at higher latitudes.

Simple study designs in ecology produce inaccurate estimates of biodiversity responses

This study compares the accuracy of different ecological study designs in estimating biodiversity responses to environmental impacts and finds that more robust designs like BACI are significantly more accurate than simpler designs.

Vulnerable species interactions are important for the stability of mutualistic networks

The paper quantifies the risk of mutualistic interactions based on vulnerability and importance across 41 pollination and seed dispersal networks, finding that more vulnerable interactions are also more important for network stability.

When can we trust population trends? A method for quantifying the effects of sampling interval and duration

This paper quantifies how sampling interval and duration affect confidence in species population trends, finding that significant declines are reliable but insignificant trends require more data.

bmotif: a package for motif analyses of bipartite networks

bmotif is an R package for analyzing bipartite network motifs, providing mathematical formalization and tools to study meso-scale structure in ecological networks.

Abundance drives broad patterns of generalisation in plant-hummingbird pollination networks

The paper investigates the direction of the abundance-generalisation relationship in plant-hummingbird pollination networks and finds that abundance drives generalisation, supported by neutral processes.

Uncovering indirect interactions in bipartite ecological networks

The paper introduces a framework using bipartite motifs to analyze indirect interactions in ecological networks, showing how they reveal ecological differences missed by traditional metrics.