Aim Intraspecific trait variability (ITV) is a key component of biodiversity because it informs how organisms respond to abiotic and biotic conditions. Understanding how the variability among individuals within a population (population‐level ITV) changes along environmental gradients offers insight into how local processes contribute to broad‐scale biodiversity patterns. Here, we examine how climate and species‐richness intera...

Aim To (a) produce a list of the most widespread naturalised non‐native plant species across cities of the world; (b) explore whether cities on different continents are invaded by the same group of widespread naturalised species; and (c) elucidate the origins of the most widespread naturalised urban species. Location Global. Time Period No specific period. Major Taxa Studied Vascular plants. Method Using the most comprehensive...

While the relative importance of bottom‐up and top‐down processes in structuring patterns of aquatic taxonomic diversity has been widely explored for many taxa, the response of aquatic microbial communities to bottom‐up: top‐down processes is not well understood. Further, studies of bottom‐up: top‐down processes in aquatic systems often focus on taxonomic diversity, leaving the response of other components of diversity (e.g.,...

Aim Ecological theory suggests that dispersal limitation and selection by climatic factors influence bacterial community assembly at a continental scale, yet the conditions governing the relative importance of each process remains unclear. The carnivorous pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea provides a model aquatic microecosystem to assess bacterial communities across the host plant's north–south range in North America. This stu...

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...

Aim Raptors, a highly threatened but ecologically important group of birds, have been recognized as a good proxy for overall biodiversity in conservation planning. However, previous work on raptor diversity focused predominantly on taxonomic diversity. Here, we assess the global patterns of raptor taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity and their association with current and historical environmental factors. Location...

Aim The expansive spatial scale of pelagic communities and the difficulty in acquiring pelagic species' functional traits have stymied an understanding of marine community dynamics. We assembled and analysed a shark trait database and community phylogeny to identify the major axes of trait variation that define shark functional groups. We tested whether membership to biophysical macroecological strata is related to these funct...

Aim Urbanization is becoming one of the most important drivers of global environmental change as human population and economic development rapidly increase. However, the effects of urbanization on plant phenology are still poorly understood, especially for leaf senescence and growing season length across large spatial scales. We aimed to fill this knowledge gap by combining in situ observations and remote sensing phenological...

The importance of climate, habitat structure, and higher trophic levels on microbial diversity is only beginning to be understood. Here, we examined the influence of climate variables, plant morphology, and the abundance of aquatic invertebrates on the microbial biodiversity of the northern pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea . The plant's cup‐shaped leaves fill with rainwater and support a miniature, yet full‐fledged, ecosystem...

Aim How do factors such as space, time, climate and other ecological drivers influence food web structure and dynamics? Collections of well‐studied food webs and replicate food webs from the same system that span biogeographical and ecological gradients now enable detailed, quantitative investigation of such questions and help integrate food web ecology and macroecology. Here, we integrate macroecology and food web ecology by...

Should we build our own phylogenetic trees based on gene sequence data, or can we simply use available synthesis phylogenies? This is a fundamental question that any study involving a phylogenetic framework must face at the beginning of the project. Building a phylogeny from gene sequence data (purpose‐built phylogeny) requires more effort, expertise, and cost than subsetting an already available phylogeny (synthesis‐based phy...

Aim Ecological communities are composed of both species and the biotic relationships (interactions or spatial associations) among them. Biotic homogenization in species composition (i.e., increased site‐to‐site similarity) is recognized as a common consequence of global change, but less is known about how the similarity of species relationships changes over space and time. Does homogenization of species composition lead to hom...

We propose a novel multivariate method to analyse biodiversity data based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation ( LDA ) model. LDA , a probabilistic model, reduces assemblages to sets of distinct component communities. It produces easily interpretable results, can represent abrupt and gradual changes in composition, accommodates missing data and allows for coherent estimates of uncertainty. We illustrate our method using tree dat...

Aim The network structure of food webs plays an important role in the maintenance of diversity and ecosystem functioning in ecological communities. Previous research has found that ecosystem size, resource availability, assembly history and biotic interactions can potentially drive food web structure. However, the relative influence of climatic variables that drive broad‐scale biogeographic patterns of species richness and com...

Aim Species introductions and extinctions have reorganized the earth's biota, often leaving formerly spatially distinct assemblages more similar in species composition, a process termed biotic homogenization. The study of biotic homogenization has been almost entirely focused on the change in taxonomic similarity between assemblages through time. Here, we provide a trait‐based method for calculating functional similarity throu...