Prediction of novel reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens would be improved by the identification of interspecific drivers of host competence (i.e., the ability to transmit pathogens to new hosts or vectors). Tick‐borne pathogens can provide a useful model system, because larvae become infected only when feeding on a competent host during their first blood meal. For tick‐borne diseases, competence has been

Understanding how natural forest disturbances control tree regeneration is key to predicting the consequences of globally accelerating forest diebacks on carbon stocks and forest biodiversity. Tropical cyclones (TCs) are important drivers of forest dynamics in Eastern Asia, and it is predicted that their importance will increase. However, little is known about the impact of TCs on forest regeneration

Dynamic range models are proposed to investigate species distributions and to project range shifts under climate change. They are based upon the Hutchinsonian niche theory, specifying that the occurrence of a species in an environmental space should be limited to positions where the intrinsic growth rate is positive. Evaluating population growth rate is, however, difficult for physiologically structured

Numerous studies have assessed whether species niches are conserved in geographically separated regions. However, most of them were performed on invasive species, with the limitation that such species have likely not yet reached their potential distribution in the invaded region. Here we test the hypothesis of niche conservatism in the entire group of 25 amphitropical desert disjunct plant species

Drought stress has focused on water availability during the growing season, thus primarily on summer. However, variation in rainfall continentality can produce striking vegetation differences. We aim to disentangle summer water balance from winter rainfall continentality, to better understand how climate regulates the distributions of woody plants in the western USA.

Ecosystem carbon use efficiency (CUEe) is a core parameter of ecosystem process models, but its relationships with climate are still uncertain, especially for ecosystems with harsh environments. Large inconsistencies in climate impacts on the CUEe have been reported among various spatial scales. The goal of this study was to examine whether warming promotes or restricts the CUEe and whether the CUEe

The aim of this study was test whether maximum body mass and jaw length are reliable predictors of trophic position (TP) in fishes, and to compare linear and nonlinear machine‐learning (ML) models incorporating biogeography, habitat and other morphological traits.

When alien species are introduced to new ranges, climate or trait mismatches may initially constrain their population growth. However, inter‐ and intraspecific selection in the new environment should cause population growth rates to increase with residence time. Using a species‐for‐time approach, we test whether with increasing residence time (a) negative effects of climatic mismatches between the

Body size explains most of the variation in fitness within animal populations and is therefore under constant selection from ecological and reproductive pressures, which often promote its evolution in sex‐specific directions, leading to sexual size dimorphism (SSD). Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the vast diversity of SSD across species. These hypotheses emphasize: (a) the mate competition

Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and determinants in tropical tree crown allometry. In this

The diversity and composition of natural communities are rapidly changing due to anthropogenic disturbances. Magnitude of this compositional reorganization varies across the globe, but reasons behind the variation remain largely unknown. Disturbances induce temporal turnover by stimulating species colonizations, causing local extinctions, altering dominance structure, or all of these. We test which

Vegetation phenology is highly sensitive to climate change. The timing of spring phenology in temperate grasslands is regulated primarily by temperature and precipitation. The aim of this study was to determine whether the primary factor regulating vegetation phenology has changed under ongoing climate change and the underlying mechanisms.

Tree species diversity can increase the stability of ecosystem productivity by increasing mean productivity and/or reducing the standard deviation in productivity. However, stand structure, environmental and socio‐economic conditions influence plant diversity and might strongly influence the relationships between diversity and stability in natural forest communities. The relative importance of these

Plants that host root‐symbiotic nitrogen‐fixing bacteria have an important role in driving terrestrial ecosystem processes, but N‐fixing ability is unequally distributed among plant taxa and ecosystems. Here we explore the large‐scale distribution of N‐fixing plant species worldwide.

Identifying how climate change, habitat loss, and corridors interact to influence species survival or extinction is critical to understanding macro‐scale biodiversity dynamics under changing environments. In North America, the ice‐free corridor was the only major pathway for northward migration by megafaunal species during the last deglaciation. However, the timing and interplay among the late Quaternary

An increase in conifer mortality has been observed widely across the boreal forest biome. We investigate the causes of this mortality, in addition to the geospatial and temporal dynamics of mortality, in Siberian pine and fir stands.

Knowledge of the drivers of ecosystem changes in the past is key to understanding present ecosystem responses to changes in climate, fire regimes and anthropogenic impacts. Northern Hemisphere‐focussed studies suggest that climate and human activities drove turnover during the Holocene in temperate ecosystems. Various drivers have been invoked to explain changes in Southern Hemisphere temperate vegetation

In Laura H. Antão et al. (2020) the authors would like to notify the readers that in the original published version of the article, an error was introduced to the start of the second sentence in section 2.2 resulting in the log number being included. The correct text is as follows: We used ln‐transformed responses to account for pronounced differences in species richness and number of individuals along

River flow regimes are changing globally as a consequence of human use of freshwater resources. Additionally, rivers are among the most invaded ecosystems. Invasion biology predicts that the establishment and spread of non‐native species might be favoured both by new environmental regimes (niche opportunities) and by human‐mediated dispersal (propagule pressure). Here, we expand on past research by

A major goal in modern ecology is understanding the source of variation in species responses to anthropogenic change. Trait‐based approaches show promise, but traits found to be predictive in one study often fail in others. We seek to understand whether variation in traits’ explanatory power comes about due to interaction effects—between multiple traits and between traits and the environment. We assess

Sexual size dimorphism is thought to vary in a predictable manner with overall body size, a pattern named “Rensch's rule”. The rule is thought to suggest different predictions for taxa with female‐ and male‐biased dimorphism. This leaves taxa where both types of dimorphism are common in limbo. Rensch's rule is usually estimated using the reduced major axis (RMA) slope of a regression of male size on

How environmental factors drive plant distribution across the globe is one of the most fundamental questions in ecology. Nevertheless, the relative importance of different environmental factors in driving plant distributions across spatial scales and among plant groups is not clear. This study aims to disentangle how plant–environment relationships vary with latitude and among plant taxa.

The evolutionary causes of the latitudinal diversity gradient are debated. Hypotheses have ultimately invoked either faster rates of diversification in the tropics or more time for diversification owing to the tropical origins of higher taxa. Here, we perform the first test of the diversification rate and time hypotheses in freshwater ray‐finned fishes, a group comprising nearly a quarter of all living

Global anthropogenic changes have altered biogeography and phenology of marine populations, thereby promoting a spatial reconfiguration in the functioning of marine ecosystems. Among these changes, massive proliferations of jellyfish in temperate latitudes warn of potential alterations in biogeochemical fluxes, ecosystems’ structure and assets, and the services they provide to human welfare. Understanding

Biogeographical regions (realms) reflect patterns of co‐distributed species (biotas) across space. Their boundaries are set by dispersal barriers and difficulties of establishment in new locations. We extend new methods to assess these two contributions by quantifying the degree to which realms intergrade across geographical space and the contributions of individual species to the delineation of those

Trait variation within species can reveal plastic and/or genetic responses to environmental gradients, and may indicate where local adaptation has occurred. Here, we present a dataset of rangewide variation in leaf traits from seven of the most ecologically and economically important tree species in Europe. Sample collection and trait assessment are embedded in the GenTree project (EU‐Horizon 2020)

Ecological niche models (ENMs) typically require point locations of species’ occurrence as input data. Where exact locations are not available, geographical centroids of the respective administrational spatial units (ASUs) are often used as a substitute. We investigated how the use of ASU centroids in ENMs affects model performance, what role the size of ASUs plays, and what effects different grain

The strength of species interactions is traditionally expected to increase toward the Equator. However, recent studies have reported opposite or inconsistent latitudinal trends in the bottom‐up (plant quality) and top‐down (natural enemies) forces driving herbivory. In addition, these forces have rarely been studied together thus limiting previous attempts to understand the effect of large‐scale climatic

Growth rates of organisms are routinely used to summarize physiological performance, but the consequences of local evolutionary history and ecology are largely missed by analyses on wide biogeographical scales. This broad approach has been commonly applied to other physiological parameters across terrestrial and aquatic environments. Here, we examine growth rates of marine bivalves across all biogeographical

High levels of species richness in mountains are associated with their hypothetical roles as cradles and/or museums of diversity, but the generality of these roles remains unknown. To fill this gap, we tested these two hypotheses at a global scale and assessed the direct and indirect effects of abiotic regional features on the variation of montane amphibian richness world‐wide.

Despite global biodiversity losses, trends at local and regional scales are context dependent. Recent studies have been criticized for lacking baselines preceding human impacts, and few such studies have addressed the landscape scale. Our aim was to quantify temporal trends in landscape‐scale tree diversity during an unambiguous period of massively increased anthropogenic disturbance and to test the

Assessing long‐term shifts in faunal assemblages is important to understand the consequences of ongoing global environmental change. One approach to assess drivers of assemblage changes is to identify the traits associated with synchronous shifts in count trends among species. Our research identified traits influencing trends in 73 years of count data on migrating raptors recorded in the north‐eastern

The recent past has seen a tremendous surge in soil macroecological studies and new insights into the global drivers of one‐quarter of the biodiversity of the Earth. Building on these important developments, a recent paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography outlined promising methods and approaches to advance soil macroecology. Among other recommendations, White and colleagues introduced the concept

The emergence of pattern in the natural world can carry important messages about underlying processes. For example, collections of broadly similar terrestrial ecosystems have historically been categorized as biomes – groupings of systems that sort along energetic and structural process axes. In marine systems however, a similar classification of biomes has not emerged. The aim here is to develop an

We compiled a global database of long‐term riverine fish surveys from 46 regional and national monitoring programmes and from individual academic research efforts, with which numerous basic and applied questions in ecology and global change research can be explored. Such spatially and temporally extensive datasets have been lacking for freshwater systems in comparison to terrestrial ones.

Trait data are widely used in ecological and evolutionary phylogenetic comparative studies, but often values are not available for all species of interest. Traditionally, researchers have excluded species without data from analyses, but estimation of missing values using imputation has been proposed as a better approach. However, imputation methods have largely been designed for randomly missing data

Biodiversity on Earth is threatened by climate change. Despite the vulnerability of freshwater habitats to human impacts, most climate change projections have focused on terrestrial systems. Here, we examined how the current distributions and biodiversity of stream taxa might change under mitigated, stabilizing and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Across a variety of taxonomic scales, species diversity is unevenly distributed among its constituent units, and clades with few species are more common than expected assuming homogeneous rates of speciation and extinction among lineages. In order to explain the prevalence of species‐poor families among a global and species‐rich radiation of passerine birds, we test whether these groups share common

We still lack a consensus on the main variables driving changes in migratory strategies. Different hypotheses have been proposed: productivity, energy, environmental heterogeneity, and genetic predisposition. This work takes an integrative view and analyses migrations from a macroecological perspective estimating the extent to which different environmental variables and historic factors influence migratory

Climate and land use are key determinants of biodiversity, with past and ongoing changes posing serious threats to global ecosystems. Unlike most other organism groups, plant species can possess dormant life‐history stages such as soil seed banks, which may help plant communities to resist or at least postpone the detrimental impact of global changes. This study investigates the potential for soil

Topographic complexity is widely accepted as a key driver of biodiversity, but at the patch‐scale, complexity–biodiversity relationships may vary spatially and temporally according to the environmental stressors complexity mitigates, and the species richness and identity of potential colonists. Using a manipulative experiment, we assessed spatial variation in patch‐scale effects of complexity on intertidal

Body size frequency distributions are often skewed to the right, with a greater frequency of small‐sized species. Right skewness can appear when speciation is biased towards small species and extinction towards large ones. In contrast, limits imposed by environmental constraints will select taxa to co‐occur in assemblages and can modify size distributions to the left or to the right. We analysed whether

The spatio‐temporal connectivity of forest patches in lowland agricultural landscapes and their age matter to explain current biodiversity patterns across regional as well as biogeographical extents, to the point that their effect exceeds the one of macroclimate for plant diversity in the understorey of temperate forests. Whether this remains true for other taxonomic groups is still largely unknown

Woody plants vary greatly from tall trees to branching shrubs with increasing dryness. Variation in plant allometry is driven by both biotic and abiotic factors, reflecting different plant adaptation strategies in different environments. Here, we explore how aboveground allometry of different woody plants responds to increasing dryness along an extensive aridity gradient.

Climate and host richness are essential drivers of global gradients in parasite diversity, and the few existing studies on parasites have mostly investigated their effects separately. The advantages of combining these factors into a single analytical framework include unravelling the relative roles of abiotic and biotic drivers of parasite diversity. We compiled a dataset of helminths of amphibians

Variation in plant defence traits has been frequently assessed along large‐scale macroclimatic clines. In contrast, local‐scale changes in the environment have recently been proposed to also modulate plant defence traits. Yet, the relative importance of drivers at both scales has never been tested. We aimed to quantify the relative importance of environmental drivers inherent to large and small spatial

Studies on latitudinal patterns in plant defence have traditionally overlooked the potential effect that resource availability may have in shaping plant defence. Likewise, latitudinal patterns of tolerance traits have rarely been studied, yet they can be a critical component of plant defence. Therefore, the aim of our study was to examine latitudinal variation in the production of tolerance and resistance

Invasive species have the potential to alter hydrological processes by changing the local water balance. However, general patterns of how rainfall is partitioned into interception, throughfall and stemflow for invasive species worldwide have been seldom explored. We (a) describe the percentage of interception, throughfall and stemflow for invasive woody plant species; (b) analyse the influence of morphological

Geological processes of island growth and erosion, in addition to eustatic sea‐level fluctuations, alter key physical properties of oceanic islands, such as area, elevation and isolation over time. These dynamics operate over similar time‐scales to the biogeographical processes of colonization, speciation and extinction, and thus should strongly affect island biodiversity patterns as we observe them

A central question in ecology has been that of why animal home ranges scale more steeply with body size than do metabolic rates. Yet, the generality of this notion has scarcely been tested in non‐model species like ectotherms, which have lower metabolic requirements than endotherms and which may, therefore, have different home range area requirements. Our aim was to examine how home range area scales

The enemy release hypothesis (ERH) posits that exotic species suffer less enemy damage than natives, which promotes their successful invasion. However, the generality of less damage for exotics remains widely debated. A recent view proposes that enemy release (ER) could change systematically with latitude, potentially helping to explain these inconsistencies. Here, we test whether exotic plant species

Fine root traits underpin terrestrial ecosystem functioning. Despite ongoing plant diversity loss due to anthropogenic activities, our understanding of the effects of plant diversity on fine root traits remains elusive. We addressed: (a) Do fine roots modify their traits in response to species mixtures? (b) Do these responses change with the species richness in mixtures, stand age, and soil depth?

To better understand how climate change drives altitudinal treeline dynamics at large spatial scales.

The species pool specific for a site includes all species from the region that are theoretically able to live in the site's particular ecological conditions. The absent portion of the site‐specific species pool forms the site’s dark diversity, which is unobservable and can only be estimated. Most existing methods to designate dark diversity act in a binary fashion. Here, we argue that the species pool

Local suitability estimated with species distribution models (SDMs) could indicate the maximum abundance attainable by species. Often the abundance–suitability relationship is wedge‐shaped because species do not reach their maximum potential in every suitable location. We explore how SDM performance, the amount of information lost when converting continuous abundance into presence–absence data and

Understanding broad‐scale ecological patterns and processes is necessary if we are to mitigate the consequences of anthropogenically driven biodiversity degradation. However, such analyses require large datasets and current data collation methods can be slow, involving extensive human input. Given rapid and ever‐increasing rates of scientific publication, manually identifying data sources among hundreds