General

Corals in a marginal environment rely on establishment over dispersal

Brooding species Stylophora pistillata. Photo credit Erika Woolsey.

 

By Erika Woolsey and Sally Keith

Lord Howe Island (31.5°S) is the southernmost coral reef in the world, sitting 1000 km south of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), and...

Functional structure and specialization in three tropical plant–hummingbird interaction networks across an elevational gradient in Costa Rica

 

 By María Alejandra Maglianesi 

A primary aim of community ecology is to identify the processes that govern multispecies assemblages across environmental gradients. Ecological networks comprising interacting species of plants and pollinators are particularly...

Slicing up gridded data with geoknife

Figure 1: geoknife output from processing the PRISM dataset (Daly et al. 1994) according to ecoregion. Mean monthly precipitation for the month of May is shown here.

By Jordan Read

 

Downloading huge datasets for desktop processing can eat network...

When does competition matter at the large scales studied by biogeographers?

Editor's choice article for November 2015

By William Godsoe

Competition occurs when different living things harm one another. It is common in nature. As one example, the grass in my lawn becomes less dense when weeds run amok. But it isn’t clear...

Megafauna and ecosystem functions: learning from the giants

By Yadvinder Mahli

We live in the shadows of lost giants. Until relatively recently almost every major vegetated land area on Earth possessed an abundance of large animals that we now only associate with African game parks. Mesmerizing early art shows how much these...

Scared of a ghost: Why Newfoundland caribou migrate despite the disappearance of their historic predator

By Guillaume Bastille-Rousseau 

 

Migration in animals is one of the most spectacular biological phenomena on the planet. Theory predicts that, to evolve, the benefits of migration (in terms of lifetime reproductive success) should outweigh the costs of moving...

Wind dispersal results in a gradient of dispersal limitation and environmental match among discrete aquatic habitats

by Zsófia Horváth, Csaba F. Vad, Robert Ptacnik

 

The Seewinkel region lies on the bordering lowland area between eastern Austria and western Hungary. It has sodic soil and several extremely shallow (<1 m) aquatic habitats, so-called soda pans were formed in...

The introductions of non-native fish species affect the isotopic structure of recipient communities across the globe

by Julien Cucherousset

EDITOR*S CHOICE OCTOBER 2015

Multiple anthropogenic pressures including the widespread introduction of non-native species threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Non-native species have been reported to induce ecological impacts...

Faster (and exact) phylogenetic diversity computations in R

By Constantinos Tsirogiannis and Brody Sandel

Some species assemblages represent a narrow section of the tree of life, while others include a broader swath. This difference can be quantified with phylogenetic diversity measures, which describe the diversity of an...

What determines Komodo dragon survival?

A Komodo dragon walks on the beach in Komodo National Park, Indonesia. (Photograph by Achmad Ariefiandy).

 

By Tim Jessop, Deni Purwandana, Achmad Ariefiandy and Claudio Ciofi.

 

Across islands, animals may experience marked local environmental...

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