Environmental markets are a rapidly emerging tool to mobilize private funding to incentivize landholders to undertake more sustainable land management. How units of biodiversity in these markets are measured and subsequently traded creates key challenges ecologically and economically because it determines whether environmental markets can deliver net gains in biodiversity and efficiently lower the costs of conservation. We dev...

Tropical forests are changing in composition and productivity, probably in response to changes in climate and disturbances. The responses to these multiple environmental drivers, and the mechanisms underlying the changes, remain largely unknown. Here, we use a functional trait approach on timescales of 10,000 years to assess how climate and disturbances influence the community‐mean adult height, leaf area, seed mass, and wood...

Motivation Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater biodiversity in macroecological studies and applied freshwater research is missing. We aim to fill t...

Aim Modern pollen assemblages provide a means to calibrate fossil pollen data and to provide a translation from habitat and vegetation type to pollen representation. Here we provide a database of modern pollen abundances from a broad range of neotropical habitats and locations. Location The Neotropics, especially western Amazonia, the Andes, The Galápagos, Central America, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Taxon Angiosperms and Gymnospe...

Aim Observed, realized niche space often underestimates species’ physiological tolerances due to interactions with other species, dispersal constraints, and because some combinations of influential environmental factors do not currently exist in the real world. Conversely, correlative ecological niche models rely on the assumption that the range of environmental conditions encompassed by a species’ geographic distribution accu...

Aim Despite recognition that realized distributions inherently underestimate species' physiological tolerances, we are yet to identify the extent of these differences within diverse taxonomic groups. The degree to which species could tolerate environmental conditions outside their observed distributions may have a significant impact on the perceived extinction risk in ecological models. More information on this potential error...

Based on the sensitivity of species to ongoing climate change, and numerous challenges they face tracking suitable conditions, there is growing interest in species' capacity to adapt to climatic stress. Here, we develop and apply a new generic modelling approach ( AdaptR ) that incorporates adaptive capacity through physiological limits, phenotypic plasticity, evolutionary adaptation and dispersal into a species distribution m...

Fossil pollen records from the high Andes of Ecuador and northern Peru show that Alnus increased in abundance at most sites following warming associated with the onset of the Holocene. The peak of Alnus pollen abundance occurred between ∼9000 and 5000 yr BP. However, between 6500 and 4500 yr BP, the abundance of Alnus pollen declined markedly in all of the available records, including sites both within and above its modern dis...

The small recently infilled lake basin of Marcacocha (13°13′S, 72°12′W, 3355 m) in the Cuzco region of Peru has a morphology and location that renders it extremely sensitive to environmental change. A record of vegetation, human impact and climatic change during the past 4200 yr has been obtained from a highly organic core taken from the centre of the basin. Sustained arid episodes that affected the Peruvian Andes may be detec...