Droughts are intensifying in the humid Neotropics, raising concerns about the impacts on ecosystem processes related to C cycling, such as decomposition and CO 2 respiration. In particular, the resilience of multiple functions to extreme droughts in Neotropical aquatic systems remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to predict drought‐driven feedbacks on C cycling. Here, we used rain shelters placed above tank bromelia...

Little is known of how Neotropical freshwater ecosystems will respond to future climate scenarios. In Neotropical rainforests, a substantial fraction of the freshwater available to the aquatic fauna is found within phytotelmata, plant-held waters that form aquatic islands in a terrestrial matrix. We hypothesized that phytotelmata in close proximity have higher resilience capacity to severe drought than the isolated ones, under...

There is growing recognition that ecosystems may be more impacted by infrequent extreme climatic events than by changes in mean climatic conditions. This has led to calls for experiments that explore the sensitivity of ecosystems over broad ranges of climatic parameter space. However, because such response surface experiments have so far been limited in geographic and biological scope, it is not clear if differences between st...

Aim Locally abundant species are usually widespread, and this pattern has been related to properties of the niches and traits of species. However, such explanations fail to account for the potential of traits to determine species niches and often overlook statistical artefacts. Here, we examine how trait distinctiveness determines the abilities of species to exploit either common habitats (niche position) or a range of habitat...

The main theories explaining the biological diversity of rain forests often confer a limited understanding of the contribution of interspecific interactions to the observed patterns. We show how two‐species mutualisms can affect much larger segments of the invertebrate community in tropical rain forests. Aechmea mertensii (Bromeliaceae) is both a phytotelm (plant‐held water) and an ant‐garden epiphyte. We studied the influence...