Over recent decades, the eastern North Pacific Ocean (ENP) has undergone significant climate-driven change, characterized by rising sea surface temperatures (SSTs), a northward expansion of the North Pacific Transition Zone (NPTZ), and more frequent marine heatwaves. Juvenile North Pacific loggerhead sea turtles ( Caretta caretta ), a highly mobile species sensitive to environmental variability, have emerged as a sentinel spec...

The transition from a free‐living lifestyle to endosymbiosis represents a large evolutionary shift, impacting various aspects of any organism's biology, including its molecular‐genetic groundwork. So far, it has been impossible to generalise the impact this lifestyle shift has on genomic architecture. This study explores this phenomenon using a new model system: neodalyellid flatworms (Rhabdocoela), a diverse assemblage of fre...

Climate change is a major driver of global biodiversity loss, yet the precise mechanisms linking climate change to population declines remain poorly understood. We developed a novel, broadly applicable framework that integrates biophysical, nutritional, and population modeling to capture fundamental physiological constraints on mammalian herbivores and applied it to investigate the causes of declines in ringtail possums of the...

The North Pacific Transition Zone (NPTZ) is known as a global marine hotspot for many endangered and commercially significant highly mobile marine species. In the last few decades, the region has undergone unprecedented physical and biological transformations in response to climate variability and change. Although it is anticipated that many highly mobile species will need to adapt and shift their distributions, current predic...

Invasive species are a growing global economic and ecological problem. However, it is not well understood how environmental factors mediate invasive range expansion. In this study, we investigated the recent and rapid range expansion of common tansy across environmental gradients in Minnesota, USA. We densely sampled individuals across the expanding range and performed reduced representation sequencing to generate a dataset of...

Given the climate projections for livestock rearing regions globally, understanding the inflammatory status of livestock under various heat loads will be informative to animal welfare and management. A survey of plasma inflammatory markers was conducted, and blood leucocyte counts followed to investigate the capacity of the ~ 500 kg grain fed Black Angus steer to respond to and recover from a moderate heat load challenge. Two...

A core challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately characterize how organisms experience their environments and the biological mechanisms by which they respond. All organisms are thermodynamically connected to their environments through the ex...

Aims Species distribution models (SDMs) are often used to forecast potential distributions of important invasive or rare species. However, situations where models could be the most valuable ecologically or economically, such as for predicting invasion risk, often pose the greatest challenges to SDM building. These challenges include non‐equilibrium range expansion, low or uneven prevalence, and projecting distributions into en...

The North Pacific Loggerhead sea turtle ( Caretta caretta ) undergoes one of the greatest of all animal migrations, nesting exclusively in Japan and re-emerging several years later along important foraging grounds in the eastern North Pacific. Yet the mechanisms that connect these disparate habitats during what is known as the “lost years” have remained poorly understood. Here, we develop a new hypothesis regarding a possible...

Knowing where species occur is fundamental to many ecological and environmental applications. Species distribution models (SDMs) are typically based on correlations between species occurrence data and environmental predictors, with ecological processes captured only implicitly. However, there is a growing interest in approaches that explicitly model processes such as physiology, dispersal, demography and biotic interactions. T...

Inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis of the root causes of overfishing can lead to misguided and ineffective fisheries policies and programmes. The “Malthusian overfishing narrative” suggests that overfishing is driven by too many fishers chasing too few fish and that fishing effort grows proportionately to human population growth, requiring policy interventions that reduce fisher access, the number of fishers, or the human popu...

How climate constrains species’ distributions through time and space is an important question in the context of conservation planning for climate change. Despite increasing awareness of the need to incorporate mechanism into species distribution models ( SDM s), mechanistic modeling of endotherm distributions remains limited in this literature. Using the American pika ( Ochotona princeps ) as an example, we present a framework...

Latitudinal gradients in biotic interactions have been suggested as causes of global patterns of biodiversity and phenotypic variation. Plant biologists have long speculated that outcrossing mating systems are more common at low than high latitudes owing to a greater predictability of plant–pollinator interactions in the tropics; however, these ideas have not previously been tested. Here, we present the first global biogeograp...

Climate refugia are regions that animals can retreat to, persist in and potentially then expand from under changing environmental conditions. Most forecasts of climate change refugia for species are based on correlative species distribution models ( SDM s) using long‐term climate averages, projected to future climate scenarios. Limitations of such methods include the need to extrapolate into novel environments and uncertainty...

Aim Body size often varies clinally, with dominant explanations centred on how body size influences heat exchange (e.g. Bergmann's rule). However, for endotherms, pelage properties can also dramatically alter heat exchange – a point emphasized by Scholander in the 1950s but which has received little attention in biogeographical analyses. Here, we investigate how geographical variation in both body size and fur properties of th...