Whole IBS Special Issue here

Top left photo:

Barred fruit-eater (Pipreola arcuata). The barred fruit-eater inhabits the cloud forests along the Andes from Venezuela to Bolivia. It mainly feeds on fruit. It is a characteristic species in the bird assemblages along an elevational gradient in south-east Peru studied by Dehling et al. in this IBS special issue. Photo by Matthias Dehling.

 

Top right photo:

A two-tailed Pasha butterfly (Charaxes jasius) at rest upon its larval host strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo) in southwest Spain. The Pasha caterpillars depend specifically on A. unedo for feeding, so the plant needs to be present for the insect to settle in an area. Butterfly and plant distributions are expected to change along forthcoming decades due to global warming, and these changes can be statistically predicted for both organisms. It is likely that predictions based on the two organisms taken together are more restrictive than for any one of them taken separately, and this is often the case for butterflies as shown in the study elaborated by Romo et al. in this issue. Thus, some of the recent predictions on area contractions for European butterflies are probably overoptimistic if they have not taken their larval resources into account. Photo by Helena Romo.

 

Middle photo:

A hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus). The hoary bat is one of the most widespread chiropteran species in the New World, occurring from northern Canada to northern Argentina and Chile. Across its distribution, hoary bats co-occur with different combinations of other bat species belonging to a diverse array of genera, from several neotropical taxa with very restricted distribution to widespread forms of nearctic origin. These combinations determine the continental patterns of species- and higher-taxon richness examined by Arita et al. in this issue. Photo by Hector Arita.

 

Bottom photo:

Sediments from lakes (such as Fallison Lake in northern Wisconsin) often preserve fossil pollen. When combined with data from many other lakes, fossil pollen provides information on associations between species and relationships between species and the environment, especially for the last 21 000 years. Photo by Jessica Blois.

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