Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

The Moore Center for Science at Conservation International is one of the world’s premier conservation research institutes, producing and applying groundbreaking and policy-relevant research to help decision-makers protect nature. To date, Conservation International has published more than 1,100 peer-reviewed articles, many in leading journals including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

On average, each of our scientific papers is cited more than 45 times by other scholars — a rate exceeding that of any other U.S. conservation organization as well as leading universities.

Here is an archive of our most recent research.

Unifying community detection across scales from genomes to landscapes

Stephanie F. Hudon, Andrii Zaiats, Anna Roser, Anand Roopsind, Cristina Barber, Brecken C. Robb, Britt A. Pendleton, Meghan J. Camp, Patrick E. Clark, Merry M. Davidson, Jonas Frankel‐Bricker, Marcella Fremgen‐Tarantino, Jennifer Sorensen Forbey, Eric J. Hayden, Lora A. Richards, Olivia K. Rodriguez, T. Trevor Caughlin

Oikos

April 18, 2021

Biodiversity science encompasses multiple disciplines and biological scales from molecules to landscapes. Nevertheless, biodiversity data are often analyzed separately with discipline‐specific methodologies, constraining resulting inferences to a single scale. To overcome this, we present a topic modeling framework to analyze community composition in cross‐disciplinary datasets, including those generated from metagenomics, metabolomics, field ecology and remote sensing. Using topic models, we demonstrate how community detection in different datasets can inform the conservation of interacting plants and herbivores. We show how topic models can identify members of molecular, organismal and landscape‐level communities that relate to wildlife health, from gut microbes to forage quality. We conclude with a future vision for how topic modeling can be used to design cross‐scale studies that promote a holistic approach to detect, monitor and manage biodiversity.

CITATION

Hudon, S. F., Zaiats, A., Roser, A., Roopsind, A., Barber, C., Robb, B. C., … Caughlin, T. T. (2021). Unifying community detection across scales from genomes to landscapes. Oikos, 130(6), 831–843. doi:10.1111/oik.08393