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Habitat destruction due to human land‐use activities is well recognized as a central threat to biodiversity. However, there is still debate about the relative influence of its two components, habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, mostly because few studies have been able to disentangle their respective effects. We studied mechanisms by which habitat destruction might influence the prevalence of...
Identification of refugia from climate change is increasingly considered important for biodiversity conservation, but the distribution of putative refugia may vary across alternative climate scenarios, impeding conservation decision‐making. Based on 117 plant species representative of ecoregions within south‐eastern Australia, we provide a case study identifying in situ refugia across a spectrum of...
Numerous Neotropical rainforest species are distributed in both Amazonia and Central America, reflecting a rich history of biotic interchange between regions. However, some plant lineages are endemic to one region, due in part to the dispersal barrier posed by the Northern Andean Cordilleras and adjacent savannas. To investigate the role of biogeographic filtering across the northern Andes in regional...
What leads to classically recognized patterns of biodiversity remains an open and contested question. It remains unknown if observed patterns are generated by biological or non‐biological mechanisms, or if we should expect the patterns to emerge in non‐biological systems. Here, we employ analogies between GNU/Linux operating systems (distros), a non‐biological system, and biodiversity, and we look...
Interactions between resource and consumer species are organized in ecological networks. Species interactions in these networks are influenced by the functional traits of the interacting partners, but the generality of trait‐based interaction rules and the relationship between functional traits and a species’ specialization on specific interaction partners are not yet understood. Here we combine data...
The idea that a positive abundance–range size relationship (ARR) is pervasive in nature has been challenged by recent studies focused on montane and island vertebrate assemblages. However, because some of these studies used species’ local abundance and regional or global range size in examining the ARRs, the negative and neutral trends reported are questionable. Here, by relating species’ mean abundance...
In studies of spatial or temporal beta diversity, community composition data, often containing many zeros, must be transformed in some way before they are analysed by multivariate methods of data analysis. Data are transformed to reduce the skewness of species distributions and make dissimilarities double‐zero asymmetrical. Criteria have recently been proposed to determine which dissimilarity functions...
The decay of assemblage similarity with spatial distance can be explained by alternative mechanisms: dispersal limitation and species sorting. To understand their relative contributions, we compare the decay in faunal similarity with spatial distance and, independently, with climatic distance, of 21 beetle taxa with varying dispersal abilities and ecological niches, in southern and northern Europe...
Natural history collections are alternative data sources to plot‐based species inventories for analysing macroecological species turnover. Herbarium records sample diversity well at regional level and are taxonomically validated. However, they are ad hoc from a sampling perspective, generating spatial and taxonomic biases. The implications of biased sampling on beta diversity (β) estimation, and use...
Animals regularly return to locations such as foraging patches, nests, dens, watering holes, or movement corridors, and these revisited locations are often sites of ecological significance. Analyzing the temporal and spatial pattern of revisitation can lead to important insights into the life history and ecology of populations. We introduce the R package ‘recurse’ to calculate revisitations to locations...
A central problem in ecology is to understand how human impacts affect plant–animal interactions that lead to effective seed dispersal services for plant communities. Seed dispersal services are the outcome of plant–frugivore interactions that often form local networks of interacting species. Recent work has shown that some frugivorous bird species are more critical to network organization than others...
Despite more than a century of federal protection, the California sea otter Enhydra lutris nereis remains threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the population has not appreciably expanded its range in two decades. Here, we examine a novel dataset of 725 sea otter live strandings from 1984–2015 to gain insights into demographic and environmental factors underlying threats to sea...
Biotic interactions have been rarely included in traditional species distribution models, wherein joint species distribution models (JSDMs) emerge as a feasible approach to incorporate environmental factors and interspecific interactions simultaneously, making it a powerful tool for analyzing the structure and assembly processes of biotic communities. However, the predictability and statistical robustness...
Whether species interactions influence species response to environment and species ranges has always been a central question in ecology. Joint species distribution models (JSDMs) simultaneously model the species–environment relationships of multiple species and the residual correlation between these species. These residual correlations are assumed to depict whether species co‐occur less or more often...
Large carnivores can be a key factor in shaping their ungulate prey's behavior, which may affect lower trophic levels. While most studies on trade‐offs between food acquisition and risk avoidance by ungulate prey species have been conducted in areas with limited human impact, carnivores are now increasingly returning to highly anthropogenic landscapes. Many of these landscapes are dominated by forestry,...
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