From a conservation perspective, quantifying potential refugial capacity has been predominantly focused on climate refugia, which is critical for maintaining the persistence of species and ecosystems. However, protection from other stressors, such as human‐induced changes in fire and hydrology, that cause habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation is also necessary to ensure that conservation efforts focused on climate are n...

Summary Ruminococcus bromii is a dominant member of the human colonic microbiota that plays a ‘keystone’ role in degrading dietary resistant starch. Recent evidence from one strain has uncovered a unique cell surface ‘amylosome’ complex that organizes starch‐degrading enzymes. New genome analysis presented here reveals further features of this complex and shows remarkable conservation of amylosome components between human colo...

Summary Cereal fibres such as wheat bran are considered to offer human health benefits via their impact on the intestinal microbiota. We show here by 16S rRNA gene‐based community analysis that providing amylase‐pretreated wheat bran as the sole added energy source to human intestinal microbial communities in anaerobic fermentors leads to the selective and progressive enrichment of a small number of bacterial species. In parti...

Pervasive warming can lead to chronic stress on forest trees, which may contribute to mortality resulting from fire‐caused injuries. Longitudinal analyses of forest plots from across the western US show that high pre‐fire climatic water deficit was related to increased post‐fire tree mortality probabilities. This relationship between climate and fire was present after accounting for fire defences and injuries, and appeared to...

Concern over rapid global changes and the potential for interactions among multiple threats are prompting scientists to combine multiple modelling approaches to understand impacts on biodiversity. A relatively recent development is the combination of species distribution models, land‐use change predictions, and dynamic population models to predict the relative and combined impacts of climate change, land‐use change, and altere...

Recent studies suggest that species distribution models ( SDM s) based on fine‐scale climate data may provide markedly different estimates of climate‐change impacts than coarse‐scale models. However, these studies disagree in their conclusions of how scale influences projected species distributions. In rugged terrain, coarse‐scale climate grids may not capture topographically controlled climate variation at the scale that cons...

As a clear consensus is emerging that habitat for many species will dramatically reduce or shift with climate change, attention is turning to adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Assisted colonization is one such strategy that has been predominantly discussed in terms of the costs of introducing potential competitors into new communities and the benefits of reducing extinction risk. However, the success or failure o...

Rapid climate change jeopardizes tree populations by shifting current climate zones. To avoid extinction, tree populations must tolerate, adapt, or migrate. Here we investigate geographic patterns of genetic variation in valley oak, Quercus lobata Née, to assess how underlying genetic structure of populations might influence this species’ ability to survive climate change. First, to understand how genetic lineages shape spatia...

Summary Many of the substrates available as energy sources for microorganisms in the human colon, including dietary plant fibre and secreted mucin, are insoluble. It seems likely that such insoluble substrates support a specialized microbiota, and in order to test this hypothesis, faecal samples from four healthy subjects were fractionated into insoluble (washed particulate) and liquid fractions. Analysis of 1252 PCR‐amplified...

Summary Insoluble plant polysaccharides and endogenous mucin are important energy sources for human colonic microorganisms. The object of this study was to determine whether or not specific communities colonize these substrates. Using faecal samples from four individuals as inocula for an anaerobic in vitro continuous flow system, the colonization of wheat bran, high amylose starch and porcine gastric mucin was examined. Recov...