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Decreasing similarity between ecological communities with increasing geographic distance (i.e. distance‐decay) is a common biogeographical observation in free‐living communities, and a slightly less common observation for parasite communities. Ecological networks of interacting species may adhere to a similar pattern of decreasing interaction similarity with increasing geographic distance, especially...
When the drivers of biological turnover in space are the same as those that drive turnover through time, space can be substituted for time to model how patterns of variation are predicted to change into the future. These space‐for‐time substitutions are widely used in ecological modeling but have only recently been applied to the study of microevolutionary processes, particularly over relatively fine...
Dispersal (i.e. movement from a natal or breeding site to another breeding site) is a central process in ecology and evolution as it affects the eco‐evolutionary dynamics of spatially structured populations. Dispersal evolution is regulated by the balance between costs and benefits, which is influenced by the individual phenotype (i.e. phenotype‐dependent dispersal) and environmental factors (i.e...
Climate change is driving the redistribution of species at a global scale and documenting and predicting species' responses to warming is a principal focus of contemporary ecology. When interpreting and predicting their responses to warming, species are generally treated as single homogenous physiological units. However, local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity can result in intraspecific differences...
Classic research on elevational gradients in plant–herbivore interactions holds that insect herbivore pressure is stronger under warmer, less seasonal climates characteristic of low elevations, and that this in turn selects for increased defence in low‐ (relative to high‐) elevation plants. However, recent work has questioned this paradigm, arguing that it overly simplifies the ecological complexity...
Climate warming has been proposed as the main cause of the recent range shifts seen in many species. Although species' thermal tolerances are thought to play a key role in determining responses to climate change, especially in ectotherms, empirical evidence is still limited. We investigate the connection between species' thermal tolerances, elevational range and shifts in the lower elevational limit...
Biodiversity extinction thresholds are abrupt declines in biological diversity that occur with habitat loss, associated with a decline in habitat connectivity. Matrix quality should influence the location of thresholds along habitat loss gradients through its effects on connectivity; however these relationships have seldom been explored empirically. Using field data from 23 independent 1254 ha landscapes...
Landscape‐level forest management has long been hypothesized to affect forest insect outbreak dynamics, but empirical evidence remains elusive. We hypothesized that the combination of increased hardwood relative to host tree species, prevalence of younger forests, and fragmentation of those forests due to forest harvesting legacies would reduce outbreak intensity, increase outbreak frequency, and...
Understanding influences of environmental change on biodiversity requires consideration of more than just species richness. Here we present a novel framework for understanding possible changes in species' abundance structures within communities under climate change. We demonstrate this using comprehensive survey and environmental data from 1748 woody plant communities across southeast Queensland,...
Biogeography is an implicit and fundamental component of almost every dimension of modern biology, from natural selection and speciation to invasive species and biodiversity management. However, biogeography has rarely been integrated into human or veterinary medicine nor routinely leveraged for global health management. Here we review the theory and application of biogeography to the research and...
It is debated whether alien plants in new environments benefit from being mycorrhizal and whether widely distributed natives and aliens differ in their associations with mycorrhizal fungi. Here, we compared whether species differing in their origin status, i.e. natives, archaeophytes (alien species introduced before the year 1500) and neophytes (introduced after the year 1500), and arbuscular mycorrhizal...
Tropical forests harbor diverse ecological communities of plants and animals that are organized in complex interaction networks. The diversity and structure of plant–animal interaction networks may change along elevational gradients and in response to human‐induced habitat fragmentation. While previous studies have analyzed the effects of elevation and forest fragmentation on species interaction networks...
Hutchinson's n‐dimensional hypervolume concept for the interpretation of niches as geometric shapes has provided a foundation for research across different fields of ecology and evolution. There is now an expanding set of applications for hypervolume concepts, as well as a growing set of statistical methods available to operationalize this concept with data. The concept has been applied to environmental,...
Global climate change has already caused local declines and extinctions. These losses are generally thought to occur because climate change is progressing too rapidly for populations to keep pace. Based on this hypothesis, numerous predictive frameworks have been developed to project future range shifts and changes in population dynamics resulting from global climate change. However, recent empirical...
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