Morphological evolution and niche conservatism across a continental radiation of Australian blindsnakes.

Understanding how continental radiations are assembled across space and time is a major question in macroevolutionary biology. Here, we use a phylogenomic-scale phylogeny, a comprehensive morphological dataset, and environmental niche models to evaluate the relationship between trait and environment and assess the role of geography and niche conservatism in the continental radiation of Australian blindsnakes. The Australo-Papuan blindsnake genus, Anilios, comprises 47 described species of which 46 are endemic to and distributed across various biomes on continental Australia.

Diversity across organisational scale emerges through dispersal ability and speciation dynamics in tropical fish.

Background: Biodiversity exists at different levels of organisation: e.g. genetic, individual, population, species, and community.

The geography of climate and the global patterns of species diversity.

Climate's effect on global biodiversity is typically viewed through the lens of temperature, humidity and resulting ecosystem productivity. However, it is not known whether biodiversity depends solely on these climate conditions, or whether the size and fragmentation of these climates are also crucial. Here we shift the common perspective in global biodiversity studies, transitioning from geographic space to a climate-defined multidimensional space.

Elevational Goldilocks zone underlies the exceptional diversity of a large lizard radiation (Liolaemus; Liolaemidae).

Mountains are among the most biodiverse regions on the planet, and how these landforms shape diversification through the interaction of biological traits and geo-climatic dynamics is integral to understanding global biodiversity. In this study, we investigate the dual roles of climate change and mountain uplift on the evolution of a hyper-diverse radiation, Liolaemus lizards, with a spatially explicit model of diversification using a reconstruction of uplift and paleotemperature in central and southern South America. The diversification model captures a hotspot for Liolaemus around 40°S in lineages with low-dispersal ability and narrow niche breadths.

Priorities for conserving the world's terrestrial mammals based on over-the-horizon extinction risk.

Three major axes of global change put the world's mammal biodiversity at risk: climate change, human population growth, and land-use change. In some parts of the world the full effects of these threats on species will only be felt in decades to come, yet conservation emphasizes species currently threatened with extinction, by threats that have already occurred. There have been calls for conservation to become more proactive by anticipating and protecting species that may not yet be threatened, but have a high chance of becoming threatened in the future.

Competition and geography underlie speciation and morphological evolution in Indo-Australasian monitor lizards.

How biotic and abiotic factors act together to shape biological diversity is a major question in evolutionary biology. The recent availability of large datasets and development of new methodological approaches provide new tools to evaluate the predicted effects of ecological interactions and geography on lineage diversification and phenotypic evolution. Here, we use a near complete phylogenomic-scale phylogeny and a comprehensive morphological dataset comprising more than a thousand specimens to assess the role of biotic and abiotic processes in the diversification of monitor lizards (Varanidae).

Earth history events shaped the evolution of uneven biodiversity across tropical moist forests.

Far from a uniform band, the biodiversity found across Earth's tropical moist forests varies widely between the high diversity of the Neotropics and Indomalaya and the relatively lower diversity of the Afrotropics. Explanations for this variation across different regions, the "pantropical diversity disparity" (PDD), remain contentious, due to difficulty teasing apart the effects of contemporary climate and paleoenvironmental history. Here, we assess the ubiquity of the PDD in over 150,000 species of terrestrial plants and vertebrates and investigate the relationship between the present-day climate and patterns of species richness.

Ecological interactions shape the evolution of flower color in communities across a temperate biodiversity hotspot.

Processes driving the divergence of floral traits may be integral to the extraordinary richness of flowering plants and the assembly of diverse plant communities. Several models of pollinator-mediated floral evolution have been proposed; floral divergence may (i) be directly involved in driving speciation or may occur after speciation driven by (ii) drift or local adaptation in allopatry or (iii) negative interactions between species in sympatry. Here, we generate predictions for patterns of trait divergence and community assembly expected under these three models, and test these predictions in (Proteaceae), a diverse genus in the Southwest Australian biodiversity hotspot.

There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk.

Spicier food in hot countries has been explained in terms of natural selection on human cultures, with spices with antimicrobial effects considered to be an adaptation to increased risk of foodborne infection. However, correlations between culture and environment are difficult to interpret, because many cultural traits are inherited together from shared ancestors, neighbouring cultures are exposed to similar conditions, and many cultural and environmental variables show strong covariation. Here, using a global dataset of 33,750 recipes from 70 cuisines containing 93 different spices, we demonstrate that variation in spice use is not explained by temperature and that spice use cannot be accounted for by diversity of cultures, plants, crops or naturally occurring spices.

Spatiophylogenetic modelling of extinction risk reveals evolutionary distinctiveness and brief flowering period as threats in a hotspot plant genus.

Comparative models used to predict species threat status can help identify the diagnostic features of species at risk. Such models often combine variables measured at the species level with spatial variables, causing multiple statistical challenges, including phylogenetic and spatial non-independence. We present a novel Bayesian approach for modelling threat status that simultaneously deals with both forms of non-independence and estimates their relative contribution, and we apply the approach to modelling threat status in the Australian plant genus We find that after phylogenetic and spatial effects are accounted for, species with greater evolutionary distinctiveness and a shorter annual flowering period are more likely to be threatened.

Digest: The evolutionary relationship between environment and size in Australian rodents.

Biome shifts are thought to be relatively rare, but some clades shift among starkly different environments with relative ease. What causes these shifts, and how do they shape phenotypic evolution? Roycroft et al. found that biome shifts in the Pseudomys Division of murid rodents were repeatedly accompanied by body size evolution in accordance with Bergmann's rule, suggesting adaptive evolution in response to changing climate conditions.

Equilibrium and non-equilibrium phases in the radiation of Hakea and the drivers of diversity in Mediterranean-type ecosystems.

Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs) contain exceptional plant diversity. Explanations for this diversity are usually classed as either "equilibrium," with elevated MTE diversity resulting from greater ecological carrying capacities, or "non-equilibrium," with MTEs having a greater accumulation of diversity over time than other types of ecosystems. These models have typically been considered as mutually exclusive.

Reconstructing the Geography of Speciation from Contemporary Biodiversity Data.

Inferring the geographic mode of speciation could help reveal the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that underlie the generation of biodiversity. Comparative methods have sought to reconstruct the geographic speciation history of clades, using data on phylogeny and species geographic ranges. However, inference from comparative methods has been limited by uncertainty over whether contemporary biodiversity data retain the historic signal of speciation.

Environmental niche conservatism explains the accumulation of species richness in Mediterranean-hotspot plant genera.

The causes of exceptionally high plant diversity in Mediterranean-climate biodiversity hotspots are not fully understood. We asked whether a mechanism similar to the tropical niche conservatism hypothesis could explain the diversity of four large genera (Protea, Moraea, Banksia, and Hakea) with distributions within and adjacent to the Greater Cape Floristic Region (South Africa) or the Southwest Floristic Region (Australia). Using phylogenetic and spatial data we estimated the environmental niche of each species, and reconstructed the mode and dynamics of niche evolution, and the geographic history, of each genus.

Spatial, Phylogenetic, Environmental and Biological Components of Variation in Extinction Risk: A Case Study Using Banksia.

Comparative analyses of extinction risk routinely apply methods that account for phylogenetic non-independence, but few analyses of extinction risk have addressed the possibility of spatial non-independence. We explored patterns of extinction risk in Banksia, a plant genus largely endemic to Australia's southwest biodiversity hotspot, using methods to partition the variance in two response variables (threat status and range size) into phylogenetic, spatial, and independent components. We then estimated the effects of a number of biological and external predictors on extinction risk independently of phylogeny and space.