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The International Biogeography Society's biennial conferences are renown for being highly interdisciplinary and inspiring meetings. Biogeography is by its nature a holistic and interdisciplinary field and the conferences bring together biologists from a broad range of fields, e.g. experimental ecologists, historical biogeographers, evolutionary biologists, ecological modelers, conservation biologists,...
Tropical mountains are hotspots of biodiversity, but the factors that generate this high diversity remain poorly understood. To identify possible mechanisms that influence avian species assemblages in the tropical Andes, we studied the functional and phylogenetic diversity and the structure of species assemblages of an avian feeding guild. We analysed how functional and phylogenetic diversity, structure...
Ecological niche models (ENMs) are crucial tools for anticipating range shifts driven by climate change. As hypotheses of future biotic change, they can be difficult to test using independent data. The fossil record is the best way to assess the ability of ENMs to correctly predict range shifts because it provides empirical ranges under novel climate conditions. We tested the performance of ENMs using...
Ecological niche models represent key tools in biogeography but the effects of biased sampling hinder their use. Here, we address the utility of two forms of filtering the calibration data set (geographic and environmental) to reduce the effects of sampling bias. To do so we created a virtual species, projected its niche to the Iberian Peninsula and took samples from its binary geographic distribution...
Four major forest types are currently present in the central African rainforest; mixed forest, Marantaceae forest, monodominant Gilbertiodendron forest and swamp forest. These forest types span vast areas and demonstrate highly significant differences in diversity and productivity; yet factors responsible for their formation are poorly understood. One hypothesis is that they are as a consequence of...
Niche conservation is not ubiquitous among all species or all environmental changes. Identifying the underlying basis for variable species responses is important for conservation efforts and macroevolutionary theory and requires comparing multiple clades and types of environmental change. To examine this issue, niche stability was analyzed for a phylogenetically diverse suite of invertebrates that...
Global climatic change exerts a generalised impact on species ranges, which could be problematic if ecologically‐related species differ in their geographical response to climate change. Therefore, a combination of distribution modelling protocols is required to predict the future impacts of global warming on sets of different ecologically‐dependent species. We test the extent to which the predicted...
Non‐spatial regression models are rarely adequate for exploring ecological phenomena, especially in settings where the processes operate at large spatial scales and when model covariates do not explain all variation present in the outcome variable. Given the complexity of ecological processes, it is often unrealistic to assume a set of stationary regression coefficients can capture space‐varying and...
The number of species is known to decrease from the humid tropics towards drier and colder climates, but how species richness varies along environmental and spatial gradients within the tropical rain forests is not clear. We inventoried 214 transects of 0.25 ha to document species diversity patterns in an example plant group (ferns and lycophytes) across non‐inundated rain forests of western and central...
We address several central concerns of conservation paleobiology, namely, the inference of geographic ranges of ancestral and ancient species, the changes in geographic range under climate change, and the associated question of inferring the environmental preferences of ancestral lineages and how they have evolved over geological time. We will show why these questions might be crucial for making better...
Environmental conditions, dispersal lags, and interactions among species are major factors structuring communities through time and across space. Ecologists have emphasized the importance of biotic interactions in determining local patterns of species association. In contrast, abiotic limits, dispersal limitation, and historical factors have commonly been invoked to explain community structure patterns...
Several hypotheses have been advanced for the origin and diversification of the bat fauna of the New World. Traditional models considered one of the families (Vespertilionidae) to have had a North American origin, whilst the diversification of other seven families was thought to have occurred in South America. Present‐day patterns of diversity are the result, according to these hypotheses, of the...
A fundamental question in ecology is how are species added to the phenotypic or functional trait space when one moves from a species poor to species rich assemblage. Specifically, the functional volume of an assemblage can expand and/or be packed more tightly to accommodate an increasing number of species. Quantifying the packing and filling of trait space therefore provides critical information regarding...
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