Proximity to natural habitat is known to enhance pollination services in large‐scale agriculture, but it remains unclear whether this holds in tropical smallholder farms. These systems are embedded in ecologically complex landscapes, central to global food security, and depend heavily on biodiversity‐derived ecosystem services. We conducted a systematic review and meta‐analysis of 35 studies assessing the relationship between...

Global change will create new species interactions and alter or eliminate existing ones, a process known as interaction rewiring. This rewiring can significantly affect how ecosystems function. To better predict the future structure of ecological networks, assessing their ability to adapt to changes is crucial. Here, we introduce two concepts: ‘rewiring capacity’ of a single species (the multidimensional trait space of all its...

Biotic interactions play an important role in species diversification and maintenance and, thus, are regarded as the architecture of biodiversity. Since Darwin and Wallace, biologists have debated whether biotic interactions are stronger towards the tropics and on continents, when compared to temperate regions and islands. Here, based on 354 avian frugivory networks accounting for 22,199 interactions between 1247 bird species...

Seed dispersal by frugivorous birds facilitates plant invasions, but it is poorly known how invasive plants integrate into native communities in fragmented landscapes. We surveyed plant–frugivore interactions, including an invasive plant ( Phytolacca americana ), on 22 artificial land‐bridge islands (fragmented forests) in the Thousand Island Lake, China. Focusing on frugivory interactions that may lead to seed dispersal, we b...

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and...

Species phenology plays a key role in determining mutualistic interactions, such as those between plants and pollinators. Notably, temporal synchrony shapes the patterns of interactions by influencing the probability of encounters between interacting partners; thus, species phenology greatly contributes to structuring ecological communities. In these communities, specialized species are expected to show a high level of synchro...

Aim Species interaction networks are known to vary in structure over large spatial scales. We investigated the hypothesis that environmental factors affect interaction network structure by influencing the functional diversity of ecological communities. Notably, we expect more functionally diverse communities to form interaction networks with a higher degree of niche partitioning. Location: Americas. Time period: Current. Major...

Aim We examined the effects of space, climate, phylogeny and species traits on module composition in a cross‐biomes plant–hummingbird network. Location Brazil, except Amazonian region. Methods We compiled 31 local binary plant–hummingbird networks, combining them into one cross‐biomes metanetwork. We conducted a modularity analysis and tested the relationship between species’ module membership with traits, geographical locatio...

Aim Among the world's three major nectar‐feeding bird taxa, hummingbirds are the most phenotypically specialized for nectarivory, followed by sunbirds, while the honeyeaters are the least phenotypically specialized taxa. We tested whether this phenotypic specialization gradient is also found in the interaction patterns with their floral resources. Location Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania/Australia. Methods We compiled inter...

Aim To investigate the association between hummingbird–plant network structure and species richness, phylogenetic signal on species' interaction pattern, insularity and historical and current climate. Location Fifty‐four communities along a c . 10,000 km latitudinal gradient across the A mericas (39° N –32° S ), ranging from sea level to c . 3700 m a.s.l., located on the mainland and on islands and covering a wide range of cli...

Aim We aim to characterize the macroecological patterns in the structure of mutualistic seed‐dispersal networks. Tropical areas hold more species than temperate ones. This difference in species number may favour ecological processes that minimize interspecific competition in species‐rich areas. There is theoretical evidence that both modularity (i.e. the presence of semi‐independent groups of highly interacting species) and ne...

Summary We investigated anammox, denitrification and dissimilatory reduction of nitrite to ammonium ( DNRA ) activity in the E astern T ropical S outh P acific oxygen minimum zone ( OMZ ) off northern C hile, at high‐depth resolution through the oxycline into the anoxic OMZ core. This was accompanied by high‐resolution nutrient and oxygen profiles to link changes in nitrogen transformation rates to physicochemical characterist...

Modularity is a recurrent and important property of bipartite ecological networks. Although well‐resolved ecological networks describe interaction frequencies between species pairs, modularity of bipartite networks has been analysed only on the basis of binary presence–absence data. We employ a new algorithm to detect modularity in weighted bipartite networks in a global analysis of avian seed‐dispersal networks. We define rol...

How many dimensions (trait‐axes) are required to predict whether two species interact? This unanswered question originated with the idea of ecological niches, and yet bears relevance today for understanding what determines network structure. Here, we analyse a set of 200 ecological networks, including food webs, antagonistic and mutualistic networks, and find that the number of dimensions needed to completely explain all inter...

We quantified the removal of fixed nitrogen as N 2 production by anammox and N 2 and N 2 O production by denitrification over a distance of 1900 km along the coasts of Chile and Peru, using short‐term incubations with 15 N‐labeled substrates. The eastern South Pacific contains an oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) characterized by an anoxic, nitrate‐ and nitrite‐rich layer of ∼ 200‐m thickness below 30–90 m of oxic water. Anammox and d...