Abiotic and biotic factors are known drivers that modulate community assembly from a regional species pool. Recent evidence has highlighted the intrinsic role of phylogenetic history on communities' response to the environment. Understanding its exact role poses a challenge because community assembly is embedded in a spatio-temporal context where dispersal capabilities and biotic interactions may also

More than two billion birds migrate through the Gulf of Mexico each spring en route to breeding grounds in the USA and Canada. This region has a long history of complex natural and anthropogenic environments as the northern Gulf coast provides the first possible stopover habitats for migrants making nonstop trans-Gulf crossings during spring migration. However, intense anthropogenic activity in the

The impact of a biological invasion on native communities is expected to be uneven across invaded landscapes due to differences in local abiotic conditions, invader abundance, and traits and composition of the native community. One way to improve predictive ability about the impact of an invasive species given variable conditions is to exploit known mechanisms driving invasive species' success. Invasive

Plant traits are useful for predicting how species may respond to environmental change and/or influence ecosystem properties. Understanding the extent to which traits vary within species and across climatic gradients is particularly important for understanding how species may respond to climate change. We explored whether climate drives spatial patterns of intraspecific trait variation for three traits

Biodiversity can increase in both high- and low-connected landscapes. However, we lack predictions related to biodiversity dynamics when accounting for the temporal heterogeneity in the connections among the habitats of a landscape. Here, we study the relationship between fluctuations in landscape connectivity and biodiversity dynamics at local and regional scales. We contrast predictions about species

Patterns and processes shaping ecosystems vary across spatiotemporal scales. As plant functional traits reflect ecosystem properties, investigating their relationships with environment provides an important tool to understand and predict ecosystem structure and functioning. This is particularly important in the tundra where a changing climate may trigger severe alterations in plant communities as both

Multispecies approaches to questions in ecology and evolution are at the forefront of many fields spanning both theoretical and applied research. In conservation and landscape genetics, simulation models offer a powerful means to evaluate complex questions, yet most models lack the ability to consider landscape effects on multiple species or to simulate the complex interactions that occur among species

Many species occurrence records from specimens and publications are based on regions such as administrative units. These region-based records are accessible and dependable, and sometimes they are the only available data source; however, few species distribution models accept such data as direct input. In this paper, we present a method named Mikrubi for robust prediction of species distributions from

Novel grassland habitats along linear infrastructure have gained attention as potential supplementary or replacement habitats for species suffering from the widespread loss of traditionally managed semi-natural grasslands. However, it can take time for species to colonise new habitats, and both the historical and the current landscape composition can affect colonisation rates, particularly for grassland

Many theories have been proposed to explain the high diversity of plants in the tropics. However, we lack an understanding of the processes that drive plant diversity and community assembly at different spatial scales. Here, we applied beta-diversity partitioning to test how biotic and abiotic factors are associated with seedling beta-diversity in a tropical montane forest in southern Ecuador. We recorded

Understanding the causes and consequences of biological invasions is a great challenge in ecology and conservation biology. The ability to predict which naturalized species are likely to become invasive would be a great step forward in managing and preventing invasions. The goal of this study is to test whether invasive species are a phylogenetically clustered subset of naturalized species at continental

The ever-growing popularity of citizen science, as well as recent technological and digital developments, have allowed the collection of data on species' distributions at an extraordinary rate. In order to take advantage of these data, information of varying quantity and quality needs to be integrated. Point process models have been proposed as an elegant way to achieve this for estimates of species

Species distribution models (SDMs) have become a common tool in studies of species–environment relationships but can be negatively affected by positional uncertainty of underlying species occurrence data. Previous work has documented the effect of positional uncertainty on model predictive performance, but its consequences for inference about species–environment relationships remain largely unknown

Despite the increasingly available phylogenetic hypotheses for multiple taxonomic groups, most of them do not include all species. In phylogenetic ecology, there is still a strong demand to have phylogenies with all species in a study included. The existing software tools to graft species to backbone megatrees, however, are mostly limited to a specific taxonomic group such as plants or fishes. Here

Madagascar is home to many endemic plant and animal species owing to its ancient isolation from other landmasses. This unique fauna includes several lineages of termites, a group of insects known for their key role in organic matter decomposition in many terrestrial ecosystems. How and when termites colonised Madagascar remains unknown. In this study, we used 601 mitochondrial genomes, 93 of which

The landscape scale response of ecological communities to environmental drivers can be challenging to efficiently summarise and differentiate from expected background turnover through time. Metacommunity structure can be encapsulated by fitting joint species distribution models (JSDMs) and partitioning the variance explained into environmental, spatial and species-codistribution components. Here we

As species' ranges shift in response to human-induced global changes, species interactions are expected to play a large role in shaping the resultant range dynamics and, subsequently, the composition of modified species assemblages. Most research on the impact of species interactions on range dynamics focuses on the effects of trophic interactions and exploitative competition for resources, but an

Coastal ecosystem functioning often hinges on habitat-forming foundation species that engage in positive interactions (e.g. facilitation and mutualism) to reduce environmental stress. Seagrasses are important foundation species in coastal zones but are rapidly declining with losses typically linked to intensifying global change-related environmental stress. There is growing evidence that loss or disruption

Data on projected climate conditions for the future is essential for many applications in climate change impact studies. Yet, with the release of the CMIP6, the increasing amount of data poses challenges for users to access and process the data. Here we present the chelsa_cmip6 package to create bioclimatic variables and climatological normals based on CHELSA ver. 2.1 and cloud based CMIP6 data for

Ecologists are increasingly relying on national forest inventories to address a wide variety of issues. The ‘FIESTA' R package (Forest Inventory ESTimation and Analysis) is a tool that enables customized investigations using the extensive sample-based inventory data collected across all lands in the US by the US Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program. To date

Long-term monitoring programs are fundamental to detect changes in ecosystem health and understand ecological processes. In the current context of increasing anthropogenic threats on marine ecosystems, understanding the dynamics and response of communities becomes essential. We used data collected over 14 years in the REBENT benthic coastal invertebrates monitoring program, at a regional scale in the

Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to relate species occurrence and density to local environmental conditions, and often include a spatially correlated variable to account for spatial patterns in residuals. Ecologists have extended SDMs to include spatially varying coefficients (SVCs), where the response to a given covariate varies smoothly over space and time. However, SVCs see relatively

Species distribution models are useful for estimating the distribution and environmental preferences of rare species, but these same species are challenging to model on account of sparse data. We contrast a traditional single-species approach (generalized linear models, GLMs) with two promising frameworks for modeling rare species: ensembles of small models (ESMs), which average across simple models;

Predicting contemporary and future species distributions is relevant for science and decision making, yet the development of high-resolution spatial predictions for numerous taxonomic groups and regions is limited by the scalability of available modelling tools. Uniting species distribution modelling (SDM) techniques into one high-performance computing (HPC) pipeline, we developed N-SDM, an SDM platform

The distribution ranges and spatio-temporal patterns in the occurrence and activity of boreal bats are yet largely unknown due to their cryptic lifestyle and lack of suitable and efficient study methods. We approached the issue by establishing a permanent passive-acoustic sampling setup spanning the area of Finland to gain an understanding on how latitude affects bat species composition and activity

A changing climate reshapes the range distribution of many organisms, and species with relatively low thermal optima, like many salmonids, are increasingly expected to face local population extinctions at lower latitudes. Understanding where and how fast these changes are happening is of pivotal importance for successful mitigation and conservation efforts.

Body size is a fundamental trait determining individual fitness and ecological processes. Reduction in body size with increasing temperature has been widely observed in most ectotherms and endotherms, known as Bergmann's rule. However, we lack data to assess if ciliates, the major consumers of marine primary production, follow Bergmann's rule and what drives the distributions of their cell size. Here

Spatial wombling is an approach for detecting edges within a defined two-dimensional landscape. This is achieved by calculating the rate and direction of change through the interpolation of points. This not only gives an approximation as to the shape of the landscape but can also be used to identify candidate boundaries cells that delimit a shift from one state to another within the landscape. Here

Marine heatwaves caused by global warming are progressively degrading coral reefs worldwide via the process of coral bleaching – the expulsion of photosynthetic endosymbionts. However, coral bleaching is not spatially homogeneous, but varies across environmental gradients in association with local conditions and taxonomic composition. Emerging evidence suggests that mangrove habitats are recurrent

The environmental filtering of species traits can influence the identity of their interaction partners and the contribution of species interactions to ecosystem functioning, but the extent to which this process is influenced by landscape composition and configuration remains unclear. We combined a field experiment with an agent-based model to assess how landscape structure and local flower patch isolation

Land use changes and biodiversity loss critically disrupts ecosystem functioning and are major drivers of infectious disease outbreaks. Trypanosoma cruzi, the agent of Chagas disease, is a multi-host parasite whose epidemiology has changed due to the expansion of anthropogenic activities over natural areas. We aimed to understand the ecological processes increasing parasite prevalence at the individual

Dispersal is the primary ecological process underpinning spatial dynamics in motile species by generating flux in reproductive locations over time. In migratory species, dispersal can also occur around non-breeding ranges, but this form currently lacks a unifying theoretical framework. We present a novel conceptual model for dispersal in migrants that builds upon existing literature, differentiating

Why do some regions share more or fewer species than others? Community assembly relies on the ability of individuals to disperse, colonize and thrive in new regions. Therefore, many distinct factors, such as geographic distance and environmental features, can determine the odds of a species colonizing a new environment. For parasites, host community composition (i.e. resources) also plays a key role

With climate change, climatic optima are shifting poleward more rapidly than tree migration processes, resulting in a mismatch between species distributions and bioclimatic envelopes. Temperate hardwood tree species may take advantage of the release of climate constraints and forest management to migrate into the boreal forest. Here, we use the SORTIE-ND forest simulation model to determine the potential

Functional diversity is widely used and widespread. However, the main packages used to compute functional diversity indices are not flexible and not adapted to the volume of data used in modern ecological analyses. We here present fundiversity, an R package that eases the computation of classical functional diversity indices. It leverages parallelization and memoization (caching results in memory)

Although species are being lost at alarming rates, previous research has provided conflicting results on the extent and even direction of global biodiversity change at the local scale. Here, we assessed the ability to detect global biodiversity trends using local species richness and how it is affected by the number of monitoring sites, sampling interval (i.e. time between original survey and re-survey

The spitting spider Scytodes fusca is a species complex well known for its unusual hunting technique which involves spitting a venomous sticky silken substance over its prey. Previous studies supposed that S. fusca was native to Central and South America but had expanded to the tropics of almost every continent. We aimed to test the hypothesis of a Neotropical origin for this spider followed by a secondary

Native bee species in the United States provide invaluable pollination services. Concerns about native bee declines are growing, and there are calls for a national monitoring program. Documenting species ranges at ecologically meaningful scales through coverage completeness analysis is a fundamental step to track bees from species to communities. It may take decades before all existing bee specimens

Resource quantity (i.e. organic matter; OM) is a main driver of the prevailing energy pathway in freshwater food webs. The OM pool is mainly composed of allochthonous material, a primary resource for freshwater consumers. Contrastingly, small amounts of autochthonous OM (i.e. algae) can subsidize aquatic communities due to its higher nutritional quality. To date, there is no consensus about the relative

Organisms use color to serve a variety of biological functions, including camouflage, mate attraction and thermoregulation. The potential adaptive role of color is often investigated by examining patterns of variation across geographic, habitat and life-history gradients. This approach, however, presents a data collection trade-off whereby researchers must either maximize intraspecific detail or taxonomic

Released 4 years ago, the Wallace EcoMod application (R package wallace) provided an open-source and interactive platform for modeling species niches and distributions that served as a reproducible toolbox and educational resource. wallace harnesses R package tools documented in the literature and makes them available via a graphical user interface that runs analyses and returns code to document and

Modern home-range estimation typically relies on data derived from expensive radio- or GPS-tracking. Although trapping represents a low-cost alternative to telemetry, evaluation of the performance of home-range estimators on trap-derived data is lacking. Using simulated data, we evaluated three variables reflecting the key trade-offs ecologists face when designing a trapping study: 1) the number of

Translocations are an important conservation tool that enable the restoration of species and their ecological functions. They are particularly important during the current environmental crisis. We used a combination of text-analysis tools to track the history and evolution of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on animal translocation science. We compared this corpus with research showcased in

The recent development of continuous paleoclimatic reconstructions covering hundreds of thousands of years paved the way for a large number of studies from disciplines ranging from paleoecology to archaeology, conservation to population genetics, macroevolution to anthropology and human evolution to linguistics. Unfortunately, (paleo)climatic data can be challenging to extract and analyze for scholars

Plant–lizard interactions are still poorly studied, despite lizards are known to interact with flowering plants in many parts of the world. They are commonly reported on islands although the number of documented interactions has also increased in mainland, mostly in isolated environments. In this study, we first performed a global review to explore whether lizard–flower and lizard double mutualistic

More than two million species have been described so far, but our knowledge on most taxa remains scarce or inexistent, and the available biodiversity data is often taxonomically, phylogenetically and spatially biased. Unevenness in research effort across species or regions can interact with data biases and compromise our ability to properly study and conserve biodiversity. Herein, we assess the influence

Riparian forests provide abundant plant litter – mostly in the form of dead leaves (hereafter litter) – for both forest soils and adjacent stream ecosystems, supporting terrestrial and aquatic detritus-based food webs. Although the fate of litter is predominantly dependent on its chemical and physical traits, there is limited availability of data on those traits over large spatial scales or empirical

Understanding patterns of species coexistence is a fundamental challenge in ecology. The physical environment is believed to play an important role, influencing patterns of dispersal and biotic interactions across space and time. Floodplain forest species are presumed to interact strongly with their environment, as evidenced by pronounced spatial variation in forest composition associated with flood-driven

Understanding variation in abundance within species' ranges is fundamental for ecological and evolutionary theory and applied conservation science. The abundant-center model provides a general hypothesis based on basic ecological principles and macroscale biogeographic patterns: abundance should peak near the center of a species' range, where environmental conditions are most favorable, and decline

Species distribution models are often used to predict the potential distributions of invasive species outside their native ranges and rely on the assumption of realized niche conservatism. Analyses observed that freshwater invasive species often show high degrees of niche expansion, suggesting limited reliability of species distribution models. However, observed niche shifts can arise because of both

Hover flies (Diptera: Syrphidae) are an important group of insects that provide a multitude of key ecosystem services including pollination and biological control, yet many of their major life history traits are not understood. Some Palearctic hover fly species are known to migrate in response to changing seasonal conditions, yet this behavior is almost entirely unrecognized in Nearctic species. At

Understanding latitudinal variations in biodiversity is central for biogeography. Along the coasts of the Southeast Pacific, several taxa show inverse latitudinal patterns of biodiversity, i.e. increasing species numbers from lower to higher latitudes. A plausible explanation for these patterns is that fjords, formed during the Pleistocene glaciations, increased the diversity of available biotopes

In modeling species distributions and population dynamics, spatially-interpolated climatic data are often used as proxies for real, on-the-ground measurements. For shallow freshwater systems, this practice may be problematic as interpolations used for surface waters are generated from terrestrial sensor networks measuring air temperatures. Using these may therefore bias statistical estimates of species'

Allopatric speciation followed by the evolution of range overlap (sympatry) allows the build-up of regional diversity. However, local species richness requires that species co-occur locally (syntopy). Importantly, correct estimates of syntopy must be available to identify ecological traits facilitating it. We thus provide a method to correctly estimate local co-occurrence and demonstrate it on the

Assessing habitat loss effects on biodiversity is a major focus of ecological research. The relationship between habitat amount and biodiversity, postulated in the habitat amount hypothesis, is usually assessed at one point in time, which does not account for habitat loss as a temporal process. We examined habitat amount effects at two time periods, 1930s and 2010s, using plant data from three semi-natural

Using geospatial data of wildlife presence to predict a species distribution across a geographic area is among the most common tools in management and conservation. The collection of high-quality presence–absence (PA) data through structured surveys is, however, expensive, and managers usually have access to larger amounts of low-quality presence-only (PO) data collected by citizen scientists, opportunistic

Beyond the local abundance of species, their functional trait distinctiveness is now recognized as a key driver of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Yet, since the functional distinctiveness of a species is always relative to a given species pool, a species distinct at regional scale might not necessarily be distinct at local or community scale, and reciprocally. To assess the importance

Waterbirds disperse plant species via ingestion and egestion of seeds (endozoochory). However, our understanding about the regulating effects of seed traits, underlying mechanisms and possible (co)evolutionary processes is limited by our traditional reliance on data from feeding experiments with living waterbirds. Here, we overcome these limitations by developing and applying a new bioassay that realistically

Many biodiversity hotspots are located in montane regions, thus, understanding the underlying mechanisms driving species assembly along elevational gradients is of major interest in ecology and biogeography. Here, we assess spatial patterns and climatic drivers, and the effects of clade age, on patterns of phylogenetic structure of ferns along the world's longest elevational gradient in the central

Managing over-abundant nuisance species in anthropogenic environments typically depends on the removal of individuals, even though theoretical and empirical studies suggest that limiting environmental resources can be more effective. However, quantifying resources to be manipulated in order to achieve a desired reduction in target species can be difficult, which complicates cost estimation for a given