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Large‐scale spatial gradients of environmental conditions shape organisms, populations and ecosystems. Even though environmental gradients are a key research theme in macro‐ecology and biogeography, the effects of large‐scale, east–west, environmental gradients are largely overlooked compared with north–south gradients. Our study focused on feather moult, an important and energy demanding process...
The extinction debt, delayed species extinctions following landscape degradation, is a widely discussed concept. But a consensus about the prevalence of extinctions debts is hindered by a multiplicity of methods and a lack of comparisons among habitats. We applied three contrasting species–area relationship methods to test for plant community extinction debts in three habitats which had different...
The world's southernmost tree has been documented along with the condition and growth pattern of the world's southernmost forest on Isla Hornos, Chile. The distribution of trees at broad scales is strongly influenced by the abiotic environment and determining the position and condition of tree limits around the world is an important way to monitor global change. This offers an ideal way to test the...
Geo‐referenced species occurrences from public databases have become essential to biodiversity research and conservation. However, geographical biases are widely recognized as a factor limiting the usefulness of such data for understanding species diversity and distribution. In particular, differences in sampling intensity across a landscape due to differences in human accessibility are ubiquitous...
Altitudinal migration is a common and important but understudied behavior in birds. Difficulty in characterizing avian altitudinal migration has prevented a comprehensive understanding of this behavior. To address this, we investigated the altitudinal migration patterns and explored potential drivers for a major proportion (~70%) of the entire resident bird community along an almost 4000 m elevational...
Trait‐based ecology suggests that abiotic filtering is the main mechanism structuring the regional species pool in different subsets of habitat‐specific species. At more local spatial scales, other ecological processes may add on giving rise to complex patterns of functional diversity (FD). Understanding how assembly processes operating on the habitat‐specific species pools produce the locally observed...
Land ownership shapes natural resource management and social–ecological resilience, but the factors determining ownership norms in human societies remain unclear. Here we conduct a global empirical test of long‐standing theories from ecology, economics and anthropology regarding potential drivers of land ownership and territoriality. Prior theory suggests that resource defensibility, subsistence strategies,...
The late Quaternary of North America was marked by prominent ecological changes, including the end‐Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, the spread of human settlements and the rise of agriculture. Here we examine the mechanistic reasons for temporal changes in mammal species association and body size during this time period. Building upon the co‐occurrence results from Lyons et al. (2016) – wherein...
Island disharmony refers to the biased representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions and represents a central concept in island biology. Here, we develop a generalizable framework for approximating these source regions and conduct the first global assessment of island disharmony and its underlying drivers. We compiled vascular plant species lists for 178 oceanic...
Ongoing global climate change is driving widespread shifts in species distributions. Trends show frequent upwards shifts of treelines, but information on changes in montane forest below the treeline and in the tropics and subtropics is limited, despite the importance of these areas for biodiversity and ecosystem function. Patterns of species shifts in tropical and subtropical regions are likely to...
The need for reliable prediction of species distributions dependent upon traits has been hindered by a lack of model transferability testing. We tested the predictive capacity of trait‐SDMs by fitting hierarchical generalised linear models with three trait and four environmental predictors for 20 eucalypt taxa in a reference region. We used these models to predict occurrence for a much larger set...
Global landscapes are changing due to human activities with consequences for both biodiversity and ecosystems. For single species, terrestrial mammal population densities have shown mixed responses to human pressure, with both increasing and decreasing densities reported in the literature. How the impacts of human activities on mammal populations translates into altered global density patterns remains...
Estimating total plant diversity in extreme or hyperarid environments can be challenging, as adaptations to pronounced climate variability include evading prolonged stress periods through seeds or specialized underground organs. Short‐term surveys of these ecosystems are thus likely poor estimators of actual diversity. Here we develop a multimethod strategy to obtain a more complete understanding...
The Amazon basin contains few obvious geographic barriers, yet it is the most biodiverse region on Earth. One hypothesis to explain its diversity is that the very large rivers promote allopatric divergence. Consistent with this, maps of heliconiine butterflies made from museum specimens show high subspecies richness close to the Amazon river, suggesting that it may produce or maintain intra‐specific...
Pattern in space and time is central to ecology, and adequately designed ecological sampling is needed to resolve those patterns, pursue ecological questions and design conservation strategies. Recently, there has been an explosion of various ecological data due to the proliferation of online data‐sharing platforms, citizen science programs and new technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),...
The ongoing environmental crisis poses an urgent need to forecast the who, where and when of future species extinctions, as such information is crucial for targeting conservation efforts. Commonly, such forecasts are made based on conservation status assessments produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). However, when researchers apply these IUCN conservation status data...
Seeds are the colonizing propagules for many plants and may therefore contribute to the filtering of species during the process of colonization and community assembly. Environmental filtering of seed traits may occur among species and influence community composition, or within species and influence the environmental breadth that a given species inhabits. To test for evidence of such filtering of seed...
Understanding the drivers of species distribution is necessary in order to properly predict the future geographical ranges of colonizing species. Yet this task is challenging for species involved in intimate interactions, such as parasites, since their distribution is likely shaped by a complex interplay between environmental‐related and host‐related factors. Here we developed an original approach...
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology, biogeography and conservation biology to estimate relationships between environmental variables and species occurrence data and make predictions of how their distributions vary in space and time. During the past two decades, the field has increasingly made use of machine learning approaches for constructing and validating SDMs. Model accuracy...
Identifying where high genetic diversity is located across our planet and what factors affect the geographical patterns of genetic variation not only provides important insights into distributions of biodiversity but is also crucial for human health, animal and plant breeding and biodiversity conservation. Recent studies show that genetic diversity at nearly neutral genes decreases from the tropics...
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