Worldwide, with the decline of natural habitats, species with reduced niche breadth (specialists) are at greater risk of extinction as they cannot colonise or persist in disturbed habitat types. However, the role of thermal tolerance as a critical trait in understanding changes in species diversity in disturbed habitats, e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmidst a global biodiversity crisis, the word 'biodiversity' has become indispensable for conservation and management. Yet, biodiversity is often used as a buzzword in scientific literature. Resonant titles of papers claiming to have studied 'global biodiversity' may be used to promote research focused on a few taxonomic groups, habitats, or facets of biodiversity - taxonomic, (phylo)genetic, or functional.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpiders are a highly diversified group of arthropods and play an important role in terrestrial ecosystems as ubiquitous predators, which makes them a suitable group to test a variety of eco-evolutionary hypotheses. For this purpose, knowledge of a diverse range of species traits is required. Until now, data on spider traits have been scattered across thousands of publications produced for over two centuries and written in diverse languages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The semideciduous Atlantic Forest is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world with a great diversity of spiders. Most spider-related studies in this ecosystem focused on species richness and composition; however, little is known about their trait diversity (including morphological, ecological and/or physiological traits). Two main datasets were compiled to generate a complete record of spider traits for this ecosystem.
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