Blog

Introduced megafauna are rewilding the Anthropocene

A wild donkey (Equus asinus) in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. Photograph by Michael Lundgren.

Editor's Choice June

By Erick Lundgren et al. 

The world was once home to an astounding diversity of...

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...

Soil moisture matters

BEST POSTER AWARD

CLIMATE CHANGE BIOGEOGRAPHY 20-24 March Evora, Portugal

By Julia Kemppinen

What is soil moisture?

From an ecographical point of view, vegetation patterns are...

Body size decline with climate warming? Maybe not in temperate songbirds...

By Nicolas Dubos

Recent observation of decreases in the body size of endothermic animals lead to the proposal that body size decline is the third universal response to climate warming (after distribution range and phenological shifts). However, the mechanisms...

HOW THE HABITAT OF POLAR BEARS IS CHANGING

Photo: Karen Lone, Norsk Polarinstitutt​

By Karen Lone, Benjamin Merkel, Christian Lydersen, Kit M. Kovacs, Jon Aars

Polar bears use sea ice as a primary hunting habitat. Climate change is causing major declines in this unique habitat...

Rodents overlap less in their body size distributions in more diverse communities--could this hold a clue to explaining diversity patterns?

Juvenile Microtus pennsylvanicus, North Dakota

By Quentin Read

Ecologists have collected reams of field data, involving much sweat and toil, to explain how competing species — those with similar diets or habitat preferences —...

Clustering or network methods? Comparing different methods for bioregionalisation

 

 

Figure 1. Example of co-occurrence network based on presence data. a) Co-occurrence network with locations (green filled circles) and taxa (blue filled circles) and b) Binary matrix of species co-occurrences.​

By Francisco...

Forecasting range shifts of a cold-adapted species under climate change: Are genomic and ecological diversity within species crucial for future resilience?

By Spyros Theodoridis

Cold-adapted taxa are experiencing severe range shifts due to climate change and are expected to suffer a significant reduction of their climatically suitable habitats in the next few decades. However, it has been proposed...

How should spatial or phylogenetic eigenvectors be selected? A ten-year review and computer simulation study

By David Bauman

In what context was our study undertaken? Eigenvector mapping techniques are widely used by ecologists and evolutionary biologists to describe and control for spatial and/or phylogenetic patterns in their data....

Plant-bird interactions respond stronger to fragmentation at high than at low elevations

At 1000 m a.s.l., a paradise tanager (Tangara chilensis) consumes fruits of Myrsine coriacea.

 

By Marta Quitián, Vinicio Santillán, Carlos Iván Espinosa, Jürgen Homeier, Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Matthias Schleuning and...

Of Beta-diversity and its decrease with increasing elevation

Credits - Valerio Giacomini (1958) La Flora - Conosci L'italia, Touring Club Italiano. Milano 

By: Francesco Maria Sabatini

It's a fact. Biodiversity is not uniformly distributed over the Earth's surface. Some regions are lush with a rich...

Dispersal and alternative breeding site fidelity strategies in in the great crested newt

By: Mathieu Denoel

We aimed at examining whether distinct breeding site fidelity strategies may coexist at the intra-population level and how breeding resource characteristics and individual phenotype may affect these strategies in pond-breeding...

Climate change may drive cave spiders to extinction

By: Marco Isaia, Stefano Mammola and Sara Goodacre

Despite the impact of global climate change being documented on a broad
range of biotas, the effects of altered temperatures on biological
communities...

Effects of grain size and niche breadth on species distribution modeling

 

By Thomas Connor

A large body of work in ecology of conservation is devoted to figuring out where species truly are and what causes them to be in some places and not others. Termed species distribution modeling, or SDM for short, this...

Seasonal climate conditions and land use associated with trends in summer Monarch abundance

By Sarah P. Saunders and Elise F. Zipkin

 

Migration is a captivating phenomenon that continues to fascinate both biologists and the public. In many species—ranging from the smallest insects to the largest mammals—thousands or even...

Climate change and constraint: why can’t more species respond to rapid warming?

Our ‘muse.’ A male Hudsonian godwit on the tundra in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. Photo by Andrew S. Johnson.

By Nathan R. Senner @nrsenner

One of the fundamental problems currently facing scientists and conservationists is determining...

The downsizing of insular frugivore communities

This Aldabra giant tortoise Aldabrachelys gigantea is eating the fruit of an endemic Pandanus plant on Rodrigues. There were no frugivores left that were large enough to be able to swallow and disperse their seeds until these tortoises were introduced to...

Global patterns in the effects of predator declines on sea urchins

The venomous long-spined sea urchin, Diadema setosum, gathers together on a coral reef to spawn.

By Hannah Sheppard Brennand

Biologists have long been fascinated by the differences between tropical and temperate regions on...

Importance of migratory habitats

Northern pintail males and females.

By Ruscena Wiederholt and Brady Mattsson

Conserving or managing migratory species is notoriously challenging since their seasonal movements can cross international borders and continents – even...

If the apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Dispersal limitation and climatic niche conservatism shape dragonfly assemblages across Europe

Adaptations to habitats with low temporal and spatial stability (such as the depicted area in the Scottish Highlands, where air temperatures can drop below minus 10°C until Summer) allowed lentic dragonfly species to recolonize areas north of the 0°C isotherm at the Last...

Pages

Subscribe to Blog

Recent Comments & Hot Topics