The American manatee ( Trichechus manatus ) requires freshwater mainly from rivers and springs to maintain osmoregulatory balance in saline environments. However, in Brazil's semi‐arid Potiguar Basin, manatees now rely solely on submarine freshwater springs because hypersaline estuaries have become unsuitable sources of freshwater. We applied MaxEnt modeling to presence‐only data (sightings and filtered telemetry records) to p...

Non‐native species introductions have caused biodiversity loss worldwide, yet it is unclear how temporal diversity patterns vary across native and non‐native communities, and what mechanisms control their respective dynamics and assembly. Using a unique 12‐year time series dataset of arthropods sampled in forest fragments on Terceira Island, we observed no systematic species losses but steady temporal β‐diversity (Sørensen dis...

Bees are essential for ecosystem functioning, pollinating many wild and crop plant species. Predicting which species are most vulnerable to global changes, and how their loss may impact ecosystems and human well-being, is critical. Comprehensive information on bee response and effect traits is fundamental to these assessments. However, the Raunkiærian shortfall—insufficient trait data—remains significant for bees, particularly...

Aim Oceanic islands are known for being home to drastically different communities compared to the mainland, as their isolation and limited area significantly favour clades able to travel long distances over water. On spiders, this happens mainly, although not exclusively, through ballooning whose propensity is unevenly distributed across species and requires specific conditions, possibly influencing their microhabitat distribu...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered unparalleled political, economic, and social ramifications, exacerbating global food insecurity (FI). To understand the overall impact of the pandemic and how different socio-economic groups were affected, we assessed prevalence and severity of FI in a sample of 18,997 households across seven countries in South America. We employed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale developed by the FAO. Our r...

Current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming majority of known animal species, and as such can provide key insights into processes governing biodiversity. Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches are now emerging as powerful tools to overcome limitations in the avail...

For more than three decades, major efforts in sampling and analyzing tree diversity in South America have focused almost exclusively on trees with stems of at least 10 and 2.5 cm diameter, showing highest species diversity in the wetter western and northern Amazon forests. By contrast, little attention has been paid to patterns and drivers of diversity in the largest canopy and emergent trees, which is surprising given these h...

Research on island species–area relationships (ISAR) has expanded to incorporate functional (IFDAR) and phylogenetic (IPDAR) diversity. However, relative to the ISAR, we know little about IFDARs and IPDARs, and lack synthetic global analyses of variation in form of these three categories of island diversity–area relationship (IDAR). Here, we undertake the first comparative evaluation of IDARs at the global scale using 51 avian...