Joseph Williamson

@josephwilliamson.bsky.social

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Researching biological responses to climate change using butterflies. Into inverts / traits / tropical forests / microclimate. Postdoc at University College London (CBER). He/Him. JoeWilliamsonDB on Twitter.

people sitting in a park discussing a paper and eating ice lollies
Ecological effects of declining insect diversity and abundance. In tropical forests, declining insect populations will have substantial effects on plant community dynamics, resulting in reduced biodiversity, alterations to functional community composition of plants and ultimately reduced nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. Reductions in the abundance of insects will also have knock-on effects on insectivorous animals such as bats, birds and lizards. In forest-adjacent tropical communities, unequal patterns of decline across the trophic pyramid will result in a predator release effect on pest species, leading to reduced food security and increased outbreaks of insect-vectored disease in both humans and livestock. Increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns may affect pollinators, further exacerbating reductions in yields of locally and globally important crops. ‘Acquisitive’ leaf traits are those that maximize growth, such as high specific leaf area and leaf nitrogen content.
Phylogenetic tree of primates (left), functional OR clustering results (middle) and OR quantities of living and ancestral primate species (right). The dotted line represents the quantity (percentage) of functional ORs relative to the primate ancestor. P, Primates; Ha, Haplorrhini; A, Anthropoidea; Ca, Catarrhini; K, Cercopithecidae; H, Hominoidea; Ho, Hominidae; Hy, Hylobatidae; Ce, Cercopithecinae; Co, Colobinae; L, Platyrrhine; Ta, Tarsiidae; S, Strepsirrhini; Le, Lemuroidea; Lo, Lorisoidea. In the heatmap, each row corresponds to a species (or ancestor), while each column represents one of the 3,077 functional clusters, blue bars denote the presence of different OR functional clusters in the species, while grey bars signify absence. b, Ternary plot of the proportion of the three functional groups of OR tuning for ancestral and extant primates. The blue and red triangles refer to the 50 extant species of Haplorrhini and Strepsirrhini in the evolutionary tree of a and the blue and red dots refer to the ancestral nodes of primates, denoted by the 15 circularly labelled abbreviated letters in a. c, Total numbers of differently tuned ORs in early ancestors of anthropoids and strepsirrhines revealing notable differences between ancestors of strepsirrhines and anthropoids.
figure 3 from the paper shows the various ways that null expectations of nonlinear biodiversity loss may be altered by accounting for population responses to change
Graph showing that the upper thermal limits of bornean dung beetles cluster around 39 degrees C
a graph showing that populations of a coral live in sea surface temperatures tightly clustered around 32 degrees C
screenshot of the article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B titled 'Clustered warming tolerances and the nonlinear risks of biodiversity loss on a warming planet'
hemispherical canopy cover image of a pine forest in Spain
Figure 1 from attached paper show species thermal niches estimated from microclimate are narrower than from macroclimate data