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Climate change threatens biodiversity when species cannot tolerate, adapt to, or track shifting environmental conditions to stay within their climatic niches. A major unresolved question is whether and how species' genetic diversity modulates these dynamics, buffering against range contractions or facilitating range expansions. To test this, we integrated the largest global databases of species range shifts and genetic diversi...
Extreme events drive rapid and dynamic range fluctuationsNARA Subscribed
Proximal microclimate: Moving beyond spatiotemporal resolution improves ecological predictionsNARA Subscribed
Aim The scale of environmental data is often defined by their extent (spatial area, temporal duration) and resolution (grain size, temporal interval). Although describing climate data scale via these terms is appropriate for most meteorological applications, for ecology and biogeography, climate data of the same spatiotemporal resolution and extent may differ in their relevance to an organism. Here, we propose that climate pro...
Reading tea leaves worldwide: Decoupled drivers of initial litter decomposition mass‐loss rate and stabilizationNARA Subscribed
The breakdown of plant material fuels soil functioning and biodiversity. Currently, process understanding of global decomposition patterns and the drivers of such patterns are hampered by the lack of coherent large‐scale datasets. We buried 36,000 individual litterbags (tea bags) worldwide and found an overall negative correlation between initial mass‐loss rates and stabilization factors of plant‐derived carbon, using the Tea...
Bringing traits back into the equation: A roadmap to understand species redistributionNARA Subscribed
Ecological and evolutionary theories have proposed that species traits should be important in mediating species responses to contemporary climate change; yet, empirical evidence has so far provided mixed evidence for the role of behavioral, life history, or ecological characteristics in facilitating or hindering species range shifts. As such, the utility of trait‐based approaches to predict species redistribution under climate...
The wildlife trade is a billion‐dollar global business, involving millions of people, thousands of species, and hundreds of millions of individual organisms. Unravelling whether trade targets reproductively distinct species and whether this preference varies between captive‐ and wild‐sourced species is a crucial question. We used a comprehensive list of all bird species traded, trade listings and records kept in compliance wit...
Precipitation drives species accumulation whereas temperature drives species decline in Himalayan vertebratesNARA Subscribed
Aim Many studies have explored taxon‐specific richness patterns with elevation, but few have concurrently evaluated different mechanisms to explain elevational patterns across multiple taxa. We used a novel, cross‐taxa approach to study species richness patterns combined with a framework that tests drivers of species accumulation versus decline along the elevational gradient in the Himalayas. Location The Himalayas. Taxon Mamm...
Global maps of soil temperatureNARA Subscribed
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1‐km 2 r...
Arboreality drives heat tolerance while elevation drives cold tolerance in tropical rainforest antsNARA Subscribed
Determining how species thermal limits correlate with climate is important for understanding biogeographic patterns and assessing vulnerability to climate change. Such analyses need to consider thermal gradients at multiple spatial scales. Here we relate thermal traits of rainforest ants to microclimate conditions from ground to canopy (microgeographic scale) along an elevation gradient (mesogeographic scale) and calculate war...
The broadening in species’ thermal tolerance limits and breadth from tropical to temperate latitudes is proposed to reflect spatial gradients in temperature seasonality, but the importance of seasonal shifts in thermal tolerances within and across locations is much less appreciated. We performed thermal assays to examine the maximum and minimum critical temperatures (CT max and CT min , respectively) of a mosquito community ac...
Designing countrywide and regional microclimate networksNARA Subscribed
Issue Climate change, and its impacts on ecological, agricultural and other societal systems, is most often studied by relying on temperature data derived from countrywide weather‐station networks. Yet, these data do not capture microclimates, those arising from soil, vegetation and topography, at spatial scales relevant to the majority of organisms on Earth. We argue that a unified strategy is missing to design regional or co...
Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agendaNARA Subscribed
Forest microclimates contrast strongly with the climate outside forests. To fully understand and better predict how forests' biodiversity and functions relate to climate and climate change, microclimates need to be integrated into ecological research. Despite the potentially broad impact of microclimates on the response of forest ecosystems to global change, our understanding of how microclimates within and below tree canopies...
SoilTemp: A global database of near‐surface temperatureNARA Subscribed
Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long‐term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate‐forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked. This is particularly important in relation to...
Aim Tropical forests are vertically complex, and offer unique niche opportunities in the form of climate, habitat and resource gradients from ground to canopy. Rainforest species organize within this vertical spatial gradient and recent macroecological research suggests that the highest levels of vertical stratification occur in structurally complex and climatically stable tropical rainforests. However, although the classical...
Historical environmental stability drives discordant niche filling dynamics across phylogenetic scalesNARA Subscribed
Aim Regional diversity can increase owing to either the packing of species within regional niche space or the expansion of regional niche space. Yet, the primary factors dictating these dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we assess the relative influence of current environmental conditions (net primary productivity, NPP) versus historic environmental stability over the Last Glacial Maximum on niche filling patterns of ver...