Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified

The aim was to test whether species distribution models (SDMs) can reproduce major macroecological patterns in a species‐rich, tropical region and provide recommendations for using SDMs in areas with sparse biotic inventory data.

Agroforestry is a globally practised system of land use for achieving greater and more diverse biomass production, but it has other ecological benefits, such as mitigation of climate change. Despite this, long‐term carbon (C) accumulation in different components of agroforestry systems, the drivers for C accumulation and the linkages between tree biomass and soil C stocks remain unclear.

We studied compositional turnover in two ectoparasite taxa asking whether (a) the main driver of turnover (environmental factors, host composition, or distance) is the same in both taxa; (b) the turnover of rare and widespread fleas and mites is driven by different factors; and (c) the turnover of either fleas or mites or both respond to the same environmental gradients as the turnover of their hosts

Decades of experimental research have conclusively shown a positive relationship between species richness and ecosystem function. However, authoritative reviews find no consensus on how species loss affects function in natural communities. We analyse experimental and observational data in an identical way and test whether they produce similar results.

Coral reefs shift between distinct communities with depth throughout the world. Yet, despite over half a century of research on coral reef depth gradients, researchers have not addressed the driving force of these patterns. We present a theoretical, process‐based model of light’s influence on the shallow to mesophotic reef transition as a single quantitative framework. We also share an interactive

Ecological niches shape species commonness and rarity, yet, the relative importance of different niche mechanisms within and across ecosystems remains unresolved. We tested the influence of niche breadth (range of environmental conditions where species occur) and niche position (marginality of a species’ environmental distribution relative to the mean environmental conditions of a region) on tree‐species

Ecological disturbance is a major driver of ecosystem structure and evolutionary selection, and theory predicts that the frequency and/or intensity of disturbance should determine its effects on communities. However, adaptations of species pools to different historical disturbance regimes are rarely considered in the search for generalizable community responses to disturbance. To explore how the severity

The Neotropics currently host outstanding levels of species richness, with one‐third of the global tetrapod species. The underlying causes of these extraordinary levels of biodiversity are a topic debated in evolutionary ecology, but the main processes at work remain elusive.

Amazonian forests predominantly grow on highly weathered and nutrient poor soils. Anthropogenically enriched Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE), traditionally known as Terra Preta de Índio , were formed by pre‐Columbian populations. ADE soils are characterized by increased fertility and have continued to be exploited following European colonization. Here, we evaluated the legacy of land‐use and soil enrichment

Documenting potential interactions between species represents a major step towards understanding and predicting the spatial and temporal structure of multi‐trophic communities and their functioning. The metaweb concept summarizes the potential trophic (and non‐trophic) interactions in a given species pool. As such, it generalizes the regional species pool of community ecology by incorporating the potential

Clutch size is a key life‐history trait. In lizards, it ranges over two orders of magnitude. The global drivers of spatial and phylogenetic variation in clutch have been extensively studied in birds, but such tests in other organisms are lacking. To test the generality of latitudinal gradients in clutch size, and their putative drivers, we present the first global‐scale analysis of clutch sizes across

Urban biodiversity, and its associated ecosystem services, is an important component of the quality of life of urban residents. The "luxury effect" posits a positive association between biodiversity and socioeconomic status in urban areas, and is thus reflective of environmental injustice, as the benefits associated with biodiversity are not equitably shared across society. We aimed to determine the

Tropical species are thought to be more susceptible to climate warming than are higher latitude species. This prediction is largely based on the assumption that tropical species can tolerate a narrower range of temperatures. While this prediction holds for some animal taxa, we do not yet know the latitudinal trends in temperature tolerance for plants. We aim to address this knowledge gap and establish

In ectotherms, gradients of environmental temperature can regulate metabolism, development and ultimately fitness. The thermal adaptation hypothesis assumes that thermoregulation is costly and predicts that more thermally variable environments favour organisms with wider thermal ranges and thermal limits (i.e., critical thermal minima and maxima, CTmin and CTmax) which track environmental temperatures

1 JUSTIFICATION The original results to Reddin, Kocsis, and Kiessling (2018) included an error in the code that intended to match geographical grid cells between neighbouring ages (“matched‐cells” hereafter), via a nonsensical call to the subset() function. After correcting this coding mistake, we checked these results against those acquired with the matched‐cells step omitted entirely. The results

In the article Oliveira et al. (2019), in the original published version the name of the 2nd author was misspelt. In the author byline on the first page and the ‘How to cite this article’ section on the last page, the co‐author ‘Brett R. Sheffers’ should have been listed as ‘Brett R. Scheffers’. The online version has been corrected. The author would like to apologize for this error and any confusion

Brown, Hill & Haywood (2020) offered a critical evaluation of the theory and methods of the Oscillayers approach and attempted to test its utility by reproducing global circulation model (GCM)‐based palaeoclimatic reconstructions of two variables (Bio1 and Bio12) for four different time points (130 ka, 787 ka, 3.2 Ma and 3.3 Ma). They concluded that Oscillayers show poor agreement with independent

Multiple hypotheses predict how gradients of nutrient availability, plant biomass, and temperature shape trophic pyramids. We aim to disentangle the simultaneous influence of those factors and their indirect effects on trophic structure and individual trophic levels.

Intensive studies since the beginning of the 21st century have provided vast amounts of knowledge about soil microbial diversity at local and global scales. However, microbial habitats have been poorly investigated at large scale. This study aims to characterize soil bacterial habitats across France for the first time by integrating the description of numerous environmental factors and human activities

In Matthews et al. (2016), errors were found in Abstract section on page 841 and power (log–log) model section on page 852, due to the following reasons: To compare c‐values (from the `power log‐log species–area relationship model), the area units should be the same. However, in the analyses comparing the c‐values of the power model between habitat islands and different categories of true islands,

In McGill et al. (2019) the authors would like to correct the following errors found in the published version: In the author byline, co‐author Rampal Etienne should have been listed as Rampal S. Etienne. His Orcid ID # 0000‐0003‐2142‐7612 should have been included. The online version has been updated to reflect this change. On page 1933, under section, 4.6, the citation to “Herrera‐Alsina, van Els

Amphibians exhibit unusually diverse reproductive modes, including a wide array of parental care strategies. The evolutionary drivers of this diversity, however, remain unclear. Here, we investigate three major factors that might predict interspecific variation in parental care strategies: climate, intrasexual selection and social environment. We hypothesize that some forms of care evolved to cope

Climate change impacts forest functioning and services through two inter‐related effects. First, it impacts tree growth, with effects, for example, on biomass production. Second, climate change also reshuffles community composition, with further effects on forest functioning. However, the relative importance of these two effects has rarely been studied. Here, we developed a new modelling approach to

Taller forest canopies may harbour higher biodiversity by providing more and varied resources. No previous studies have assessed whether forest canopy height shapes the taxonomic and functional diversity of terrestrial vertebrates at global and regional scales. Here, we examine the roles of forest canopy height and other environmental variables in shaping global and regional patterns of species richness

The aim was to document the impact of the globalization of human activity on the biodiversity and biogeographical patterns of reptilian and amphibian faunas across islands worldwide.

Physiological limits to thermal extremes are often thought to determine the abundance and geographical distribution of species, but more recent evidence suggests that species interactions might be equally important. Moreover, the relative importance of these constraints might shift with changing abiotic conditions, such as climate change. Here, we explore the relative importance of physiological tolerances

Urbanization is one of the most significant anthropogenic alterations of the surface of the Earth and constitutes a major threat to biodiversity at the global level. Arthropods are a very diverse group of organisms, with many species that provide essential ecosystem services. However, their response to urbanization is still unclear. Here, we describe the first meta‐analysis to evaluate the overall

Biomes can diverge substantially in plant functional traits and disturbance regimens among regions. Given that Neotropical and Afrotropical regions have contrasting histories of the megafauna (because of the Holocene megafaunal extinction in the Neotropics), we hypothesize that they should harbour plants with different traits in relationship to herbivory and fire, especially in savannas. We predicted

Functional traits are a crucial link between species distributions and the ecosystem processes that structure those species’ niches. Concurrent increases in the availability of functional trait data and our ability to model species distributions present an opportunity to develop functional trait biogeography (i.e., the mapping of functional traits across space). Functional trait biogeography can improve

Persistent sinks of atmospheric CO2 in undisturbed peatlands are not included in future projections of the global carbon budget. We aimed to explore possible responses of northern peatlands to future climate change and to quantify the role of northern peatlands in the carbon balance of the Northern Hemisphere.

The noise filter hypothesis predicts that species using higher sound frequencies should be more tolerant of noise pollution, because anthropogenic noise is more intense at low frequencies. Recent work analysed continental‐scale data on anthropogenic noise across the USA and found that passerine species inhabiting more noise‐polluted areas do not have higher peak song frequency but have more complex

Here we evaluate Oscillayers, a new method that aims to estimate palaeoclimates for the past 5.4 Myr, and discuss the associated theoretical and methodological issues. We show that the theoretical foundation of Oscillayers is inherently limited, because the method cannot incorporate spatio‐temporal variation and different forcing mechanisms into climate reconstructions. In addition, several methodological

β‐diversity is often measured through incidence‐based dissimilarity indices, such as the Simpson and Sørensen indices. Multiple‐site versions of these indices, which have been recently developed, enhance the accountability of global heterogeneity relative to the original formulations. However, they are known to be sensitive to the number of sites, which hinders the comparison of β‐diversity between

Climate change has impacted forest ecosystems, leading to species‐level tree migration. However, the impacts of climate change on forest communities are mostly unknown. Here, we assess changes to forest communities at three scales: within‐community changes in species composition, individual community spatial shifts and changes across all communities.

The aim was to test the capacity of an ecologically focused microclimate model to capture the interaction between snow cover and soil temperature and use it to assess how historical and future climate warming affects exposure of organisms to stressfully cold conditions in shallow soil.

Free‐ranging wildlife are valuable sentinels for zoonotic, multi‐host pathogens, and new insight into parasite transmission patterns is possible through a macroecological approach. Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan capable of infecting all warm‐blooded animals, including humans, primarily through a free‐living oocyst and/or tissue cyst life stage. Anthropogenic disturbance is facilitating the spread

Changes in dryland ecosystem functioning are threatening the well‐being of human populations worldwide, and land degradation, exacerbated by climate change, contributes to biodiversity loss and puts pressures on sustainable livelihoods. Here, abrupt changes in ecosystem functioning [so‐called turning points (TPs)] were detected using time series of Earth observation data. Hotspot areas of high TP occurrence

Climate variability threatens to destabilize production in many ecosystems. Asynchronous species dynamics may buffer against such variability when a decrease in performance by some species is offset by an increase in performance of others. However, high climatic variability can eliminate species through stochastic extinctions or cause similar stress responses among species that reduce buffering. Local

More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the hypothesis that local assemblages result from a series of abiotic and biotic filters applied to regional species pools and that these filters leave predictable signals in observed diversity patterns. In theory, statistical comparisons

Our understanding of the mechanisms driving β‐diversity is still rather rudimentary. This study evaluates the influences of environmental filtering versus spatial scale of regional communities on β‐diversity across latitudes.

Providing a quantitative overview of ecosystem functioning in a three‐dimensional space defined by ecosystem stocks, fluxes and rates, across major ecosystem types and climatic zones.

Recent research has highlighted that the relationship between species interactions and latitude can differ between native and invasive plant taxa, generating biogeographical heterogeneity in community resistance to plant invasions. In the first study with foliar pathogens, we tested whether co‐occurring native and invasive lineages of common reed (Phragmites australis ) exhibit non‐parallel latitudinal

Since its emergence in the mid‐20th century, invasion biology has matured into a productive research field addressing questions of fundamental and applied importance. Not only has the number of empirical studies increased through time, but also has the number of competing, overlapping and, in some cases, contradictory hypotheses about biological invasions. To make these contradictions and redundancies

Previous work demonstrated the global variability of synchrony in tree growth within populations, that is, the covariance of the year‐to‐year variability in growth of individual neighbouring trees. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the causes of this variability and its trajectories through time. Here, we examine whether climate can explain variation in within‐population synchrony (WPS) across

Predictions of plant traits over space and time are increasingly used to improve our understanding of plant community responses to global environmental change. A necessary step forward is to assess the reliability of global trait predictions. In this study, we predict community mean plant traits at the global scale and present a systematic evaluation of their reliability in terms of the accuracy of

The aim was to determine how reptile populations respond to anthropogenic habitat modification and determine whether species traits and environmental factors influence such responses.

Nutrient enrichment is associated with plant invasions and biodiversity loss. Functional trait advantages may predict the ascendancy of invasive plants following nutrient enrichment but this is rarely tested. Here, we investigate (a) whether dominant native and non‐native plants differ in important morphological and physiological leaf traits, (b) how their traits respond to nutrient addition, and (c)

Biodiversity dynamics comprise evolutionary and ecological changes on multiple temporal scales from millions of years to decades, but they are often interpreted within a single time frame. Planktonic foraminifera communities offer a unique opportunity for analysing the dynamics of marine biodiversity over different temporal scales. Our study aims to provide a baseline for assessments of biodiversity

Ecological theory is not often applied to human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP), which estimates reduction of natural net primary production (NPP) due to harvest and land use. Here we use predator–prey theory to evaluate HANPP as “predation”. Macroecology and adaptive life history strategies also help evaluate relationships among global terrestrial HANPP, NPP, and plant biomass (B)

Historically, biomes have been defined based on their structurally and functionally similar vegetation, but there is debate about whether these similarities are superficial, and about how biomes are defined and mapped. We propose that combined assessment of evolutionary convergence of plant functional traits and phylogenetic biome conservatism provides a useful approach for characterizing biomes. We

Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) within natural plant communities can be large, influencing local ecological processes and dynamics. Here, we shed light on how ITV in vegetative and floral traits responds to large‐scale abiotic and biotic gradients (i.e., climate and species richness). Specifically, we tested whether associations of ITV with temperature, precipitation and species richness were consistent

Trees need to avoid frost damage to their young leaves by leafing out after the occurrence of the last frost, yet they also need to start photosynthesis early in the season to achieve sufficient growth. This trade‐off leads to the hypothesis that ‘safety margins’ against spring frost should become shorter, the longer the winter duration, perhaps reaching an asymptotic limit where frost damage would

To study global patterns and temporal changes in the seasonal dynamics (quantity and seasonal distribution) of terrestrial gross carbon uptake in response to global environmental change.

Temporal patterns of community dynamics are drawing increasing interest due to their potential to shed light on assembly processes and anthropogenic effects. However, interpreting such patterns considerably benefits from comparing observed dynamics to the reference of a null model. For that aim, the cyclic shift permutations algorithm, which generates randomized null communities based on empirically

Theory describing biodiversity gradients has focused on species richness with less conceptual synthesis outlining expectations for intraspecific diversity gradients, that is, broad‐scale population richness and genetic diversity. Consequently, there is a need for a diversity–gradient synthesis that complements species richness with population richness and genetic diversity.

We tested whether species–area relationships of small islands differ among plant growth forms and whether this influences the prevalence of the small‐island effect (SIE). The SIE states that species richness on small islands is independent of island area or relates to area in a different way compared with larger islands. We investigated whether island isolation affects the limits of the SIE and which

Biodiversity is currently undergoing rapid restructuring across the globe. However, the nature of biodiversity change is not well understood, as community‐level changes may hide differential responses in individual population trajectories. Here, we quantify spatio‐temporal community and stability dynamics using a long‐term high‐quality moth monitoring dataset.

Biomes worldwide are shifting with global change. Biomes whose extents are limited by temperature or precipitation, such as the tundra and savanna, may be particularly strongly affected by climate change. While woody plant encroachment is prevalent across both biomes, its relationship to temperature and precipitation change remains unknown. Here, we quantify the degree to which woody encroachment is