Defaunation and fragmentation erode small mammal diversity dimensions in tropical forests

Figure 1: Best-fitting structural equation model (full direct + indirect model). Positive and negative pathways are indicated by black and gray lines, respectively. Arrow thickness is scaled to illustrate the relative strength of effects and significant coefficients are...

A parsimonious view of the parsimony principle in ecology and evolution

The curve-fitting problem. The choice of the most plausible hypothesis is based on an arbitrary balance between goodness-of-fit and simplicity criteria. The red curve is the simplest, indicating a linear relationship between the two variables, but also the worst-fit. The...

recurse: an R package to analyze spatiotemporal patterns in revisitations from animal movement data

by Chloe Bracis

Animal movements are linked to both quotidian activities as well as larger questions of survival and reproduction. For example, one might think of an animal moving to locate food, or, on the other side of the coin, moving to avoid...

Tropical moths in the mountains are larger

By Gunnar Brehm

New study in biodiversity hotspot studied correlation between size of tropical moths and their elevational distribution

Researchers from three universities have measured more than 19 000 tropical moths from 1100 species...

Using simplified settings to advance ecological theory: a lesson from the subterranean world

by Stefano Mammola

E4 award

A wise man named Socrates once stated a famous aphorism: "I know that I know nothing". Some thousands years later, in the era of internet, satellites and artificial intelligence,...

Accessibility maps as a tool to predict sampling bias in historical biodiversity records

The King’s Map, a unique map of South Africa produced in 1790 for the King Louis XVI of France, on the observations of the French ornithologist and explorer Francois Levaillant, by M. de Laborde. By publishing journals about his voyages, Levaillant provided us with...

Is there such a thing as "flying ant day"?

We found that ants emerge throughout the summer, not just on one set day a year. Photo credit: thesun.co.uk.

By Adam Hart

Back in 2012, while digging up a leaf-cutting ant nest in Trinidad for a BBC documentary I was making, I got an...

The challenge of modeling niches and distributions for data‐poor species

Optimal and default Maxent models for the Malagasy rodent Eliurus majori (logistic output). Results correspond to the unfiltered dataset (top) and filtered dataset (bottom), and three ways of determining model settings: AICc (left), sequential criteria based on...

Wildfire–vegetation dynamics affect predictions of climate change impact on bird communities

Figure 1. Bird species assemblage were predicted using the spatially-explicit species assemblage modelling framework – SESAM – that applies successive filters to constrained predictions of richness and composition obtained by stacking species distribution models that...