Understanding the role of traits in dispersal is necessary to improve our knowledge of historical biogeography, community assembly processes and predictions of species' future movements. Here we aimed to determine the relationship between three traits (coastal distribution, body size, position on the fast/slow life history continuum) and past dispersal probability on an evolutionary timescale in chameleons

Pioneer naturalists such as Whewell, Lyell, Humboldt, Darwin and Wallace acknowledged the interactions between ecological and evolutionary forces, as well as the roles of continental movement, mountain formation and climate variations, in shaping biodiversity patterns. Recent developments in computer modelling and paleo-environmental reconstruction have made it possible for scientists to study in silico

Stem-mapped forest stands offer important opportunities for investigating the fine-scale spatial processes occurring in forest ecosystems. These stands are areas of the forest where the precise locations and repeated size measurements of each tree are recorded, thereby enabling the calculation of spatially-explicit metrics of individual growth rates and of the entire tree community. The most common

Species inventories are the building blocks of our assessment of biodiversity patterns and human impact. Yet, historical inventories based on visual observations are often incomplete, impairing subsequent analyses of ecological mechanisms, extinction risk and management success. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is an emerging tool that can provide wider biodiversity assessments than classical

Herbarium records provide a broad spatial and temporal range with which to investigate plant responses to environmental change. Research on plant phenology and its sensitivity to climate has advanced with the increasing availability of digitized herbarium specimens, but limitations of specimen-derived data can undermine the inferences derived from such research. One issue that has received little attention

The monitoring of seasonal radial growth of woody plants addresses the ultimate question of when, how and why trees grow. Assessing the growth dynamics is important to quantify the effect of environmental drivers and understand how woody species will deal with the ongoing climatic changes. One of the crucial steps in the analyses of seasonal radial growth is to model the dynamics of xylem and phloem

Although species distribution models (SDMs) are commonly used to hindcast fine-scale population metrics, there remains a paucity of information about how well these models predict future responses to climate. Many conventional SDMs rely on spatially-explicit but time-invariant conditions to quantify species distributions and densities. We compared these status quo ‘static' models with more climate-informed

Termite mounds contribute to the heterogeneity and productivity of many semi-arid ecosystems worldwide. Regular spatial patterns of termite mounds are well documented but the underlying pattern-building mechanisms remain to be clarified.

Disentangling associations between species occupancy and its environmental drivers –– climate and land cover –– along tropical mountains is imperative to predict species distributional changes in the future. Previous studies have primarily focused on identifying such associations in temperate mountain systems. Using 1.29 million robustly processed citizen science observations contributed to eBird between

An abundance of studies in marine systems have documented species range shifts in response to climate change, and many more have used species distribution models to project species ranges under future conditions. However, there is increasing interest in moving beyond a single-species focus to understand how species redistribution alters ecosystem dynamics via changes in trophic interactions. We employed

Montane small mammals are subjected to strong forces of dispersal limitation and habitat filtering that mainly operate on their community structures along the altitudinal direction. However, so far little is known about the relative contributions of dispersal and niche processes to their community assembly. By applying the newly proposed PER-SIMPER/DNCI (dispersal–niche continuum index) framework to

Late Cenozoic climate change led to the progressive aridification of Australia over the past 15 million years. This gradual biome turnover fundamentally changed Australia's ecosystems, opening new niches and prompting diversification of plants and animals. One example are termites of the Australian Amitermes group (AAG), consisting of the Australian Amitermes and affiliated genera. Although the most

According to the ‘fitness-suitability' hypothesis, ongoing changes in climate are expected to affect habitat suitability and hence species' fitness. In trees, differences in fitness may manifest as changes in growth rates, which will alter carbon uptake. Using tree-ring data, we calculated > 1.5 million annual stem growth rate estimates (standardized for tree size) for 15 677 trees representing 37

Tropical ecosystems are often biodiversity hotspots, and invertebrates represent the main underrepresented component of diversity in large-scale analyses. This problem is partly related to the scarcity of data widely available to conduct these studies and the lack of systematic organization of knowledge about invertebrates' distributions in biodiversity hotspots. Here, we introduce and analyze a comprehensive

Understanding how environmental filtering and biotic interactions structure communities across elevational and latitudinal gradients is still a matter of debate. To provide insight into their relative importance, we explore the mismatch between three dimensions of biodiversity (taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic), and compare their patterns to null models of random community assembly. We focus

Natural history collections (NHCs) represent an enormous and largely untapped wealth of information on the Earth's biota, made available through GBIF as digital preserved specimen records. Precise knowledge of where the specimens were collected is paramount to rigorous ecological studies, especially in the field of species distribution modelling. Here, we present a first comprehensive analysis of georeferencing

The increase in species number from poles to the equator is one of the most fundamental patterns in ecology. Although several hypotheses have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. While most hypotheses provide plausible explanation for high tropical diversity of tropical clades, it is unclear if similar mechanisms drive the diversity of extra-tropical

The Darwinian shortfall, i.e. the lack of knowledge of phylogenetic relationships, significantly impedes our understanding of evolutionary drivers of global patterns of biodiversity. Spatial bias in the Darwinian shortfall, where phylogenetic knowledge in some regions is more complete than others, could undermine eco- and biogeographic inferences. Yet, spatial biases in phylogenetic knowledge for major

Forest–savanna mosaics exist across all major tropical regions. Yet, the influence of environmental factors on the distribution of these mosaics is not well explored, limiting our understanding of the environmental constraints on savannas especially in Southeast Asia, where most savannas exist in mosaics. Despite clear structural and functional characteristics indicative of savannas, most SE Asian

Rapid global change has increased interest in developing ways to identify suitable refugia for species of conservation concern. Correlative and mechanistic species distribution models (SDMs) represent two approaches to generate spatially-explicit estimates of climate vulnerability. Correlative SDMs generate distributions using statistical associations between environmental variables and species presence

Climatic shifts to warmer and often drier conditions are challenging terrestrial species worldwide. These shifts are occurring more rapidly at higher elevations and latitudes, likely causing disproportionate effects to mammalian hibernators there. While there is some information about how these species' ranges are responding to climatic shifts, we lack an understanding of how climate components are

Thermophilization – changes in community composition towards greater relative abundances of species associated with warmer environments – has been described for plants and animals in many locations around the world. Disturbances of various kinds have increased rates of thermophilization in temperate sites, and this has been proposed, but not demonstrated, for some tropical environments. In this study

The rapid pace of ocean change has prompted a need to forecast likely future species distributions. Species distribution models are often categorized as either correlative (statistical) or mechanistic, and each has limitations both for advancing understanding and for prediction. Here we sought to benefit from mechanistic understanding of how and why low dissolved oxygen affects species' distributions

The influence of island dynamics and characteristics on taxonomic diversity, particularly species richness, are well studied. Yet, our knowledge on the influence of island dynamics and characteristics on other facets of diversity, namely functional and phylogenetic diversity, is limited, constraining our understanding of assembly processes on islands (e.g. biogeographic history, dispersal and environmental

Species and their interactions are more dynamic over time and space in fragmented habitats than in continuous habitats. In fragmented habitats, the low nestedness of mutualistic networks may be related to the position change of stable (high persistence over time/space) species and interactions in the networks. Previous studies have shown that stable species and interactions tend to be in the core position

Assessing the impacts of anthropogenic degradation and climate change on global carbon cycling is hindered by a lack of clear, flexible and easy-to-use productivity models along with scarce trait and productivity data for parameterizing and testing those models. We provide a simple solution: a mechanistic framework (RS-CFM) that combines remotely-sensed foliar-trait and canopy-structural data with

Large-scale biodiversity databases have great potential for quantifying long-term trends of species, but they also bring many methodological challenges. Spatial bias of species occurrence records is well recognized. Yet, the dynamic nature of this spatial bias – how spatial bias has changed over time – has been largely overlooked. We examined the spatial bias of species occurrence records within multiple

Because of land use changes, a worldwide decrease in biodiversity is underway, mostly driven by habitat degradation and fragmentation. Increasing landscape connectivity (i.e. the degree to which the landscape facilitates movement between habitat patches) has been proposed as a key landscape-level strategy to counterbalance the negative effects of habitat fragmentation. A robust theoretical and methodological

Human activity and land management practices, in particular land use change, have resulted in the global loss of biodiversity. These types of disturbance affect the shape of macroecological patterns, and therefore analyzing these patterns can provide insights into how ecosystems are affected by land use change. We here use arthropod census data from 96 sites at Terceira Island in the Azores archipelago

Estimates of demographic parameters for lesser snow geese Anser caerulescens caerulescens have become critical to understand ecosystem change in northern Canada. Exponential increase in abundance has produced hyperdensities of these herbivores that can affect Arctic ecosystem stability through intense foraging. Increased and sustained marking of individually-identifiable lesser snow geese over their

Anthropogenic-driven species extinctions are radically changing the biosphere. Biological communities may become increasingly similar to or dissimilar from one another via the processes of biotic homogenisation or heterogenisation. A key question is how the conversion of native forests to agriculture may influence these processes by driving changes in the occurrence patterns of restricted-range endemic

Anthropogenic climate change increasingly affects species phenology. Because trophic interactions often occur at specific phenological stages, changes in one species' phenology may affect others through phenological mismatch. When a consumer and a resource both exhibit a seasonal resting period, the synchrony of the end of their respective resting periods is fundamental for the persistence of their

Flying animals use aerial habitats to forage, communicate and travel. However, human activities that fragment aerial habitat with built structures, noise, and chemical or light pollution, may limit the ability of wildlife to use airspace efficiently. Applying landscape connectivity theory to aerial habitats could reveal how long-distance migrants respond to sources of aerial habitat fragmentation along

Does climate determine the trophic organization of communities around the world? A recent study showed that a limited number of community trophic structures emerge when co-occurrence of trophic guilds among large mammals is examined globally. We ask whether the pattern is general across all terrestrial mammals (n = 5272) and birds (n = 9993). We found that the six community-trophic structures previously

Rich fossil deposits of the late Quaternary help us understand responses of biodiversity to global change and thus predict the future of ecosystems. Studies from the late Quaternary, however, are often limited taxonomically, geographically (often one site), and by their use of largely taxon-based metrics that do not inform about ecosystem-level consequences of biodiversity change. Here, we compare

Species distribution models (SDMs) provide insights into species' ecology and distributions and are frequently used to guide conservation priorities. However, many uses of SDMs require model transferability, which refers to the degree to which a model built in one place or time can successfully predict distributions in a different place or time. If a species' model has high spatial transferability

The diversity of species combinations observable in sampling units reflects a species' uneven distribution and preference for specific abiotic and biotic conditions – a phenomenon most commonly expressed in terms of ecological assembly rules of plant communities and other sessile organisms (e.g. subtidal algae, invertebrates and coral reefs). We present comspat, a new R package that uses grid or transect

The representation of a land cover type (i.e. habitat) within an area is often used as an explanatory variable in species distribution models. However, it is possible that a simple binary presence/absence of the suitable habitat might be the most important determinant of the presence/absence of some species and, thus, be a better predictor of species occurrence than the continuous parameter (area)

Community composition in a given landscape is a complex product of the constituent species' niche requirements, geographic connectivity, environmental properties, species interactions and drift. In this study, we examined niche use of 16 cladoceran species in 81 zooplankton communities that inhabit environmentally variable sites along a strong urbanization gradient. We tested to what extent niche shifts

Maximising survey efficiency can help reduce the tradeoff between spending limited conservation resources on identifying population changes and responding to those changes through management. Burrow-nesting seabirds are particularly challenging to survey because nests cannot be counted directly. We evaluated a stratified random survey design for generating unbiased population estimates simultaneously

Amphibian chytridiomycosis, caused by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), has been recognized as the infectious disease causing the most catastrophic loss of biodiversity known to science, with South America being the most impacted region. We tested whether Bd prevalence is distributed among host taxonomy, ecoregion, conservation status and habitat preference in South America. Here we provide a synthesis

Defining appropriate null expectations for species distribution hypotheses is important because sampling bias and spatial autocorrelation can produce realistic, but ecologically meaningless, geographic patterns. Generating null species occurrences with similar spatial structure to observed data can help overcome these problems, but existing methods focus on single or pairs of species and do not incorporate

Evolutionary history and environmental filtering shape the phylogenetic and functional structure of regional assemblages. However, detecting the footprint of such eco-evolutionary drivers is challenging because these may often counter each other's signature. Here, we examined whether a biogeographic deconstruction approach of phylogenetic (PD) and functional diversity (FD) patterns may help in identifying

The climate variability hypothesis posits that increased environmental thermal variation should select for thermal generalists, while stable environments should favor thermal specialists. This hypothesis has been tested on large spatial scales, such as latitude and elevation, but less so on smaller scales reflective of the experienced microclimate. Here, we estimated thermal tolerance limits of 75

Reliable estimates of the distribution of species abundance are a key element in wildlife studies, but such information is usually difficult to obtain for large spatial or long temporal scales. Wildlife–vehicle collision (WVC) data is systematically registered in many countries and could be used as a proxy of population abundance if the number of WVC in each territory increase with the population abundance

Altered microclimatic conditions and higher disturbance at forest edges create environmental stress and modify resource gradients from edge to interior, changing the selection pressures acting on individuals. Although community-weighted trait-mean (CWM) shifts along edge gradients have been widely documented at the species level, it is unclear how edge effects act at the individual level, and whether

The ongoing decline of large marine vertebrates must be urgently mitigated, particularly under increasing levels of climate change and other anthropogenic pressures. However, characterizing the connectivity among populations remains one of the greatest challenges for the effective conservation of an increasing number of endangered species. Achieving conservation targets requires an understanding of

The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2021–2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, during which the recovery of degraded nature should be massively upscaled to effectively fight the climate and biodiversity crises (). Furthermore, the Parties of the Conference on Biological Diversity confront the challenge of setting ambitious targets to not only protect species and ecosystems, but also

Rapid progress is being made in understanding how dispersal strategies influence the spread of species whose ranges are expanding. However, potentially vital dispersal behaviours have so far been neglected. Social species have been demonstrated to use their own breeding performance (personal information) and the breeding performance of their conspecifics (public information) to inform both their emigration

Species distribution models have grown in complexity by incorporating fine-scale variables, including data on microclimate, physiology and species interactions. Recent studies have acknowledged the importance of the spatial scale by including higher resolution maps and more complex climatic variables. However, models rarely consider the consequences of including data related to time. Indeed, species

A crucial issue for landscape ecologists is identifying the spatial extents at which a landscape affects species occurrence. Multi-scale analyses are usually conducted to identify the ‘scale of effect', that is, the spatial extent associated with the best relationship between landscape variables and species occurrence, which is assumed to be related to species traits. However, few guidelines exist

Accurate ecological assemblage analysis requires that underlying taxonomic divisions reflect biological reality. However, the validity of many taxonomic hypotheses have never been rigorously confronted with replicable data. As a result, these categories might say more about human psychology than biology. We consider here the ways that statistically unchallenged taxonomic concepts can bias observed

Understanding and predicting the geographic distribution of taxa in hierarchical stream landscapes is a cornerstone of river ecology. A central issue is to tease apart the unique and shared effects of local and catchment predictors over species distributions. Here, we tested Hynes's influential hypothesis (1975, Baldi Memorial Lecture) that ‘In every respect, the valley rules the stream'. We predicted

Herbivory rates have classically been hypothesized to decrease from the tropics towards higher latitudes because the more benign abiotic conditions in tropical systems foster greater ecosystem complexity including greater intensity of biotic interactions. However, attempts to quantify latitudinal patterns of herbivory often fail to support this hypothesis. While biases have been offered as explanations

Spatial turnover of biological communities is determined by both dispersal and environmental constraints. However, we lack quantitative predictions about how these factors interact and influence turnover across genealogical scales. In this study, we have implemented a predictive framework based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) to quantify the signature of dispersal and environmental constraints

Spiders are dominant predators in terrestrial ecosystems and feed on prey from the herbivore and detritivore subsystem (dual subsystem omnivory) as well as on other predators (intraguild predation). Little is known about how global change potentially affects the importance of different prey groups in predator diets. In this meta-analysis we identify the impact of climatic conditions, land-use types

Recent developments in understanding and predicting species responses to climate change have emphasised the importance of both environmental variability and consideration of the wider biotic community. However, to date, the interaction between the two has received less attention. Both theoretical and empirical results suggest that the combined effect of environmental variability and interspecific interactions

Landscape heterogeneity affects population dynamics, which determine species persistence, diversity and interactions. These relationships can be accurately represented by advanced spatially-explicit models (SEMs) allowing for high levels of detail and precision. However, such approaches are characterised by high computational complexity, high amount of data and memory requirements and spatio-temporal

Squamate reptiles exhibit two reproductive modes: oviparity and viviparity. Existing large-scale studies suggest that viviparous species are more vulnerable to climate warming based on viviparous species occupying relatively colder environments, which are predicted to decline in availability under climate warming. However, oviparous and viviparous squamates are geographically widespread and their distributions