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Climate-change-induced shifts in the timing of leaf emergence during spring have been widely documented and have important ecological consequences. However, mechanistic knowledge regarding what controls the timing of spring leaf emergence is incomplete. Field-based studies under natural conditions suggest that climate-warming-induced decreases in cold temperature accumulation (chilling) have expanded

Changes in landscape configuration significantly impact ecosystems and the services they provide, including disease regulation for both humans and wildlife. Land use conversion usually favors disturbed-adapted species, which are often known reservoirs of zoonotic parasites, thereby potentially escalating spillover events (i.e., the transmission of parasites to new hosts, including humans). Here we

To determine which riverine invertebrate traits respond consistently to anthropogenic impacts across multiple biogeographic regions.

Identifying the maximum coral cover that a coral community can sustain (i.e., its ‘upper limit’) is important for predicting community dynamics and improving management strategies. Here, we quantify the relationship between estimated upper limits and key environmental factors on coral reefs: hard substrate availability, temperature and water clarity.

Freshwater ecosystems have been heavily impacted by land-use changes, but data syntheses on these impacts are still limited. Here, we compiled a global database encompassing 241 studies with species abundance data (from multiple biological groups and geographic locations) across sites with different land-use categories. This compilation will be useful for addressing questions regarding land-use change

Human activities have been reshaping the natural world for tens of thousands of years, leading to the extinction of hundreds of bird species. Past research has provided evidence of extinction selectivity towards certain groups of species, but trait information is lacking for the majority of clades, especially for prehistoric extinctions identified only through subfossil remains. This incomplete knowledge

Population density is a fundamental parameter in ecology and conservation, and taxonomic and geographic patterns of population density have been an important focus of macroecological research. However, population density data are time-consuming and costly to collect, so their availability is limited. Leveraging decades of research, TetraDENSITY 1.0 was developed as a global repository containing over

Ecological state shifts that alter the structure and function of entire ecosystems are a concerning consequence of human impact. Yet, when, where and why discrete ecological states emerge remains difficult to predict and monitor, especially in high-diversity systems. We sought to quantify state shifts and their drivers through space and time in the most ecologically complex marine ecosystem: tropical

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Mycorrhizal fungi play key roles in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. The main types of mycorrhizal associations are arbuscular mycorrhizae, ectomycorrhizae, ericoid mycorrhizae and orchid mycorrhizae. Previous studies have shown that the abundance of plants with different types of mycorrhizal associations change gradually along latitudinal and altitudinal gradients driven by the effects of

Biogeographers have believed for a long time that the geographical distributions of protists are only determined by environmental conditions, because dispersal is not limited. During the past two decades, the field has come a long way to show that historical and spatial factors also significantly contribute to shaping protist distributions, calling for a reappraisal of our understanding of protist

Ecological theory suggests that dispersal limitation and selection by climatic factors influence bacterial community assembly at a continental scale, yet the conditions governing the relative importance of each process remains unclear. The carnivorous pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea provides a model aquatic microecosystem to assess bacterial communities across the host plant's north–south range in

The global, human-mediated dispersal of invasive insects is a major driver of ecosystem change, biodiversity loss, crop damage and other effects. Trade flows and invasive species propagule pressure are correlated, and their relationship is essential for predicting and managing future invasions. Invaders do not disperse exclusively from the species' native range. Instead, the bridgehead effect, where

To quantify the intra-community variability of leaf-out (ICVLo) among dominant trees in temperate deciduous forests, assess its links with specific and phylogenetic diversity, identify its environmental drivers and deduce its ecological consequences with regard to radiation received and exposure to late frost.

Seasonality governs species composition at a given place and time. However, the effects of climate and land-use change can vary by season, altering species composition. These changes can lead to a loss of distinct seasonal community composition, representing a novel form of biotic homogenisation. We ask if breeding and winter bird communities are becoming more similar over time. If so, is homogenisation

Climate change is altering forest communities at an unprecedented pace. Current knowledge on trees' responses to climate shifts is based mostly on adults. Yet, germination traits and intraspecific variation can notably modulate species niches. This paper provides a quantitative review about warming effects on tree species' germination, the role of population effects and its implications under future

To evaluate the patterns of stream diatom beta diversity in islands versus continents across scales, to relate community similarities with spatial and environmental distances and to investigate the role of island characteristics in shaping insular diatom beta diversity.

The species that compose local communities possess unique sets of functional and ecological traits that can be used as indicators of biotic and abiotic variation across space and time. Body size is a particularly relevant trait because species with different body sizes typically have different life history strategies and occupy distinct niches. Here we used the body sizes of non-volant (i.e., non-flying)

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Habitat loss is the dominant cause of biodiversity decline around the world, yet the complexity and stability of terrestrial assemblages related to suitable habitats have been almost unknown on a global scale.

Termites are a crucial group of macroinvertebrates regulating rates of deadwood decomposition across tropical and subtropical regions. When examining global patterns of deadwood decay, termites are treated as a homogenous group. There exist key biogeographical differences in termite distribution. One such clear distinction is the distribution of fungus-growing termites (FGT, subfamily Macrotermitinae)

Species distribution models (SDMs) are powerful tools for assessing suitable habitats across large areas and at fine spatial resolution. Yet, the usefulness of SDMs for mapping species' realised distributions is often limited since data biases or missing information on dispersal barriers or biotic interactions hinder them from accurately delineating species' range limits. One way to overcome this limitation

To describe worldwide distribution of mammalian cradles and museums using the rates of phylogenetic lineage turnover as a surrogate. Additionally, we investigated the influences of current water–energy dynamics, climate instability, past climate changes and elevational ranges on the distribution of these evolutionary zones.

As global climate changes, there is a clear mismatch between the temporal and spatial characteristics of body temperature and environmental temperature, confounding the assessment of thermal stress for organisms in many ecological studies. Here, we hindcast the hourly body temperatures of intertidal molluscs to explore the differences between them and environmental temperatures (air and water temperatures)

Terrestrial predators play key roles in cycling nutrients, as well as limiting prey populations, and shaping the behaviour of their prey. Prehistoric, historic and ongoing declines of the world's predators have reshaped terrestrial ecosystems and are a topic of conservation concern. However, the availability of ecologically relevant predator functional traits is limited, hampering efforts to understand

The relative importance of traits and phylogeny to predict species extinction risk is unclear and it depends on which traits are measured and their phylogenetic conservatism. Here, we evaluate the power of functional traits, ecological characteristics, such as range size and specialization, and phylogeny to predict climatic risks in European butterflies.

Heterogeneity of the Earth's abiotic surface and subsurface (geodiversity) is increasingly recognised as an important driver of biodiversity. Theoretically, species' traits should match to abiotic conditions in the local environment. Here, we test this for the first time at a continental extent by analysing the relationships between geodiversity and plant trait diversity in forested vegetation plots

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework requires that evolutionary histories of species should be considered in conservation planning. The phylogenetic structure of species assemblages quantifies species evolutionary histories and increasingly becomes an endeavour for ecologists. Understanding the geographic patterns of phylogenetic structure of species assemblages and their drivers can

To determine the degree to which assemblages of planktonic foraminifera track thermal conditions.

Accurate estimates of species distributions are crucial for biogeography, spatial conservation, and for assessing the impacts of human activities on species. However, existing approaches to estimate species distributions have typically neglected the influence of land use intensity, potentially overlooking the negative impacts of high-intensity land uses on biodiversity. Here, we build a dataset documenting

Diet is a key aspect of life in animals. There have been numerous independent origins of herbivorous diet across animals, but the factors that explain these origins remain poorly understood. One potentially crucial factor is body temperature (Tb), as the gut-dwelling bacteria that help digest cellulose in many herbivores are thought to require high temperatures. However, analyses in birds, lizards

Long-standing theory predicts that the intensity of biotic interactions increases from high to low latitudes. Studies addressing geographic variation in predation on insect prey have often relied on prey models, which lack many characteristics of live prey. Our goals were to explore global latitudinal patterns of predator attack rates on standardised live insect prey and to compare the patterns in

Climate extremes are becoming more frequent under global warming, with substantial repercussions for vegetation growth. The degree to which climate extremes increase the risk of high-impact events on vegetation growth is of high concern.

Ongoing climate changes represent a major determinant of demographic processes in many organisms worldwide. Birds, and especially long-distance migrants, are particularly sensitive to such changes. To better understand these impacts on long-distance migrants' breeding productivity, we tested three hypotheses focused on (i) the shape of the relationships with different climate variables, including previously

We map global patterns of taxonomic and functional change between past (pre-human impacts) and present (after anthropogenic extinctions and introductions) in large oceanic island bird assemblages and investigate if these patterns can be explained by island characteristics and anthropogenic factors.

Changes in climate are likely to have major impacts on benefits (i.e., biodiversity and ecosystem services) supported by trees. Here we explore the extent to which trees can support multiple benefits, and the potential tradeoffs among them, under increasing dryness.

Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta-analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant communities is positively correlated with interspecific trait

Anthropogenic-driven biodiversity loss can impact ecosystem stability. However, most studies have only evaluated the diversity–stability relationship at the local scale and we do not fully understand which factors stabilize animal populations and communities across scales. Here, we investigate the role of species dispersal ability, climate, spatial distance and different facets of biodiversity on the

Substantial progress has been made to map biodiversity and its drivers across the planet at multiple scales, yet studies that quantify the evolutionary processes that underpin this biodiversity, and test their drivers at multiple scales, are comparatively rare. Studying most fish species, we quantify rates of body size evolution to test the role of fundamental salinity habitats in shaping rates of

Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the following research questions: (1) What are the patterns of dominance

Understanding the ecological determinants of interspecific achromatic (light-to-dark) plumage variation in birds is crucial yet challenging due to the complex interplay of climatic, habitat-related, and morphological influences. This study aimed to disentangle the effects of temperature, precipitation, habitat openness, body mass and hand-wing index (HWI, a widely used single-parameter proxy for the

The relationship between body size and trophic position (BS–TP) typically exhibits a positive correlation in aquatic foodwebs, but the strength of this relationship is contingent on ecosystem type and climate. Different hypotheses have been proposed to elucidate climate and ecosystem type effects on the BS–TP relationship for ray-finned fish. However, our understanding of whether such a relationship

Species age, the elapsed time since origination, can give insight into how species longevity might influence eco-evolutionary dynamics, which has been hypothesized to influence extinction risk. Traditionally, species' ages have been estimated from fossil records. However, numerous studies have recently used the branch lengths of time-calibrated phylogenies as estimates of the ages of extant species

Controlled experiments are increasingly important for investigating how and to what degree plant phenology responds to global climate change. Current experiments underline that chilling and forcing temperatures are two major environmental cues shaping the budburst date of temperate species, but whether experiments could reflect the observed responses to chilling has rarely been examined.

Addressing how woody plant species are distributed in space can reveal inconspicuous drivers that structure plant communities. The spatial structure of conspecifics varies not only at local scales across co-existing plant species but also at larger biogeographical scales with climatic parameters and habitat properties. The possibility that biogeographical drivers shape the spatial structure of plants

Temperature is regarded as an important driver of broad-scale biodiversity patterns. However, less is known of the role of dispersal in shaping broad-scale species and trait distributions, particularly given that species had to disperse out of glacial refugia after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Here, we used a unique dataset describing the distributions of freshwater fauna combined with trait information

A nested pattern (nestedness) in species composition is a frequent signature of insular communities. However, it remains unclear whether the drivers of nestedness are consistent across multiple island systems. Here, we investigated the pattern and drivers of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic nestedness in terrestrial mammal assemblages from 10 distinct island systems (archipelagos).

The scale of environmental data is often defined by their extent (spatial area, temporal duration) and resolution (grain size, temporal interval). Although describing climate data scale via these terms is appropriate for most meteorological applications, for ecology and biogeography, climate data of the same spatiotemporal resolution and extent may differ in their relevance to an organism. Here, we

Temporal variability in population growth rates is a fundamental property of natural populations with implications for almost any facet in ecology and evolution. Using the framework of nonlinear averaging, we test the hypothesis that the magnitude of short-term variability in population growth rates is influenced by the long-term means of climatic conditions.

Plant establishment is the result of sequential demographic processes, namely post-dispersal seed survival, seed germination, seedling survival and sapling survival. These processes can be quantified as transition probabilities between life stages through field experiments, and their product provides an overall establishment probability. This information is essential to understand demography within

We test the hypothesis that wind dispersal is more common among emergent tree species given that being tall increases the likelihood of effective seed dispersal.

Revealing the role of regional species pool size in community assembly rules is essential for extending the species-pool framework to large-scale community ecology, and thus for more comprehensive understanding of biodiversity formation. However, little has been done to couple the regional species-pool effect into local ecological processes in soil fungal communities, which play essential roles in

Modern sharks are a diverse and highly threatened group playing important roles in ecosystems. They have an abundant fossil record spanning at least 250 million years (Myr), consisting primarily of isolated teeth. Throughout their evolutionary history, sharks have faced multiple environmental changes and extinction events. Here, we aim to use dental characters to quantify how shark functional diversity

Successional changes in functional diversity provide insights into community assembly by indicating how species are filtered into local communities based on their traits. Here, we assess successional changes in taxonomic and functional richness, evenness and redundancy along gradients of climate, soil pH and forest cover.

Quantify the contribution of environmental factors (water temperature, salinity and depth) and evolutionary history to varied skeletal mineralogy in calcifying marine organisms.

Biodiversity across different scales provides multidimensional insurance for ecosystem functioning. Although the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem multifunctionality are well recorded in local communities, they remain poorly understood across scales (from local to larger spatial scales). This study evaluates how multiple attributes of biodiversity maintain ecosystem multifunctionality from local