Climate change is driving the global redistribution of species. A common assumption is that rapid range shifts occur in tandem with overall stable or positive abundance trends throughout the range and thus these species may be considered as climate change 'winners'. However, although establishing the link between range shift velocities and population trends is crucial for predicting climate change impacts it has not been empirically tested.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDispersal has a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parameterised heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. However, this heterogeneity is recurrently neglected when studying the processes underlying biodiversity variation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhenotypic plasticity enables rapid responses to environmental change, and could facilitate range shifts in response to climate change. What drives the evolution of plasticity at range edges, and the capacity of range-edge individuals to be plastic, remain unclear. Here, we propose that accurately predicting when plasticity itself evolves or mediates adaptive evolution at expanding range edges requires integrating knowledge on the demography and evolution of edge populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobal biodiversity is organised into biogeographic regions that comprise distinct biotas. The contemporary factors maintaining differences in species composition between regions are poorly understood. Given evidence that populations with sufficient genetic variation can adapt to fill new habitats, it is surprising that more homogenisation of species assemblages across regions has not occurred.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe morphology of organisms relates to most aspects of their life history and autecology. As such, elucidating the drivers of morphological variation along environmental gradients might give insight into processes limiting species distributions. In eusocial organisms, the concept of morphology is more complex than in solitary organisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Odonata, dragonflies and damselflies, constitute one of the more charismatic and better-studied orders of insects. The approximately 6,000 extant species on Earth can be variously found on all continents, except Antarctica. A relatively stable taxonomy, a relative ease of species identification and an aquatic immature stage has made the Odonata a taxon of interest in documenting the symptoms of global environmental change, especially at higher latitudes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Biological invasions are major drivers of environmental change that can significantly alter ecosystem function and diversity. In plants, soil microbes play an important role in plant establishment and growth; however, relatively little is known about the role they might play in biological invasions. A first step to assess whether root microbes may be playing a role in the invasion process is to find out if invasive plants host different microbes than neighbouring native plant species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Focus: Andersen, A. N. (2019).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat forces structure ecological assemblages? A key limitation to general insights about assemblage structure is the availability of data that are collected at a small spatial grain (local assemblages) and a large spatial extent (global coverage). Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51 ,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of more than 2,693 species and 7,953 morphospecies from local assemblages collected at 4,212 locations around the world. Ants were selected because they are diverse and abundant globally, comprise a large fraction of animal biomass in most terrestrial communities, and are key contributors to a range of ecosystem functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a framework to measure the strength of environmental filtering and disequilibrium of the species composition of a local community across time, relative to past, current, and future climates. We demonstrate the framework by measuring the impact of climate change on New World forests, integrating data for climate niches of more than 14000 species, community composition of 471 New World forest plots, and observed climate across the most recent glacial-interglacial interval. We show that a majority of communities have species compositions that are strongly filtered and are more in equilibrium with current climate than random samples from the regional pool.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn ever-increasing number of studies use tools from community phylogenetics to infer the processes underlying the assembly of communities. However, very few studies simultaneously use experimental approaches to characterize the ecological niches of species and directly assess the importance of these structuring processes. In this study, we developed an experimental approach for quantifying the use of four types of food resources and three habitat templets in temperate forest ant assemblages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKreft and Jetz's critique of our recent update of Wallace's zoogeographical regions disregards the extensive sensitivity analyses we undertook, which demonstrate the robustness of our results to the choice of phylogenetic data and clustering algorithm. Their suggested distinction between "transition zones" and biogeographic regions is worthy of further investigation but is thus far unsubstantiated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Biogeogr
January 2013
The opportunity to reflect broadly on the accomplishments, prospects, and reach of a field may present itself relatively infrequently. Each biennial meeting of the International Biogeography Society showcases ideas solicited and developed largely during the preceding year, by individuals or teams from across the breadth of the discipline. Here, we highlight challenges, developments, and opportunities in biogeography from that biennial synthesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModern attempts to produce biogeographic maps focus on the distribution of species, and the maps are typically drawn without phylogenetic considerations. Here, we generate a global map of zoogeographic regions by combining data on the distributions and phylogenetic relationships of 21,037 species of amphibians, birds, and mammals. We identify 20 distinct zoogeographic regions, which are grouped into 11 larger realms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResolving contingencies in community ecology requires comparative studies of local communities along broad-scale environmental gradients and in different biogeographic regions. However, comparisons of local ecological processes among regions require a synthetic understanding of how the species pool of potential community members influences the structure of ecological communities. Here, we outline an integrative approach for quantifying local ecological processes while explicitly accounting for species pool influences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTropical forest canopies house most of the globe's diversity, yet little is known about global patterns and drivers of canopy diversity. Here, we present models of ant species density, using climate, abundance and habitat (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF