This chapter examines the causal relationship between disturbance, succession, and ecological changes by considering the biotic feedback mechanisms. It also provides an outline of rippling effects of natural phenomena, agricultural clearings, river flooding, and human-induced disturbances to the Luquillo Mountains and other tropical ecosystems in the world. In this regard, this chapter describes the intellectual and societal motivations that have influenced people to further the forecast of the ecological changes over time.

While there is increasing recognition that social processes in cities like gentrification have ecological consequences, we lack nuanced understanding of the ways gentrification affects urban biodiversity. We analyzed a large camera trap dataset of mammals (>500 g) to evaluate how gentrification impacts species richness and community composition across 23 US cities. After controlling for the negative effect of impervious cover, gentrified parts of cities had the highest mammal species richness. Change in community composition was associated with gentrification in a few cities, which were mostly located along the West Coast. At the species level, roughly half (11 of 21 mammals) had higher occupancy in gentrified parts of a city, especially when impervious cover was low. Our results indicate that the impacts of gentrification extend to nonhuman animals, which provides further evidence that some aspects of nature in cities, such as wildlife, are chronically inaccessible to marginalized human populations.

Motivation

The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

Main types of variables included

The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record.

Spatial location and grain

BioTIME is a global database of 547,161 unique sampling locations spanning the marine, freshwater and terrestrial realms. Grain size varies across datasets from 0.0000000158 km² (158 cm²) to 100 km² (1,000,000,000,000 cm²).

Time period and grain

BioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year.

Major taxa and level of measurement

BioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates.

Software format

.csv and .SQL.