Aim Species richness of local communities may be regulated via negative diversity dependence of colonization or positive diversity dependence of extinction rate. We explore whether and how bird communities are regulated and what determines extinction and colonization rates across communities. Location North America, spanning the United States and Canada. Time Period 1995–2019. Major Taxa Studied Passerines. Methods We used lon...

Aim To determine how species richness gradients—commonly considered universal—vary across the phylogenetic hierarchy of birds and mammals, and to uncover how clade age and size predetermine the gradients. Location Global. Time Period Last 120 million years. Taxa Studied Birds and mammals (~15,000 species). Methods We used large‐scale phylogenies of birds and mammals and captured the species richness gradient for each of their...

Aim Despite the evidenced importance of insects in savannah ecosystems, the drivers of their diversity patterns remain poorly understood, particularly in the Afrotropical region. This study addresses part of this gap by investigating the effects of climate, habitat, disturbance and vegetation variables on species richness and community composition of phytophagous and predatory insects in South African savannahs. Location Kruge...

Aim Spatial diversity patterns are linked to energy availability, but how the diversity–energy relationship changes in space and time is unclear. There are three possible scenarios: (a) equilibrium dynamics, where diversity is always positively related to energy availability in both time and space; (b) out‐of‐equilibrium dynamics, where diversity is determined by energy availability in equilibrium, but diversity variation lags...

Aim Species–area relationships (SARs) are fundamental scaling laws in ecology although their shape is still disputed. At larger areas, power laws best represent SARs. Yet, it remains unclear whether SARs follow other shapes at finer spatial grains in continuous vegetation. We asked which function describes SARs best at small grains and explored how sampling methodology or the environment influence SAR shape. Location Palaearct...

Aim To evaluate the role of seasonal and non‐seasonal productivity fluctuations in global patterns of species richness. Location Worldwide. Time period 2000–2017. Major taxa studied Amphibians, birds, mammals. Methods We analysed time series of monthly variation of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a surrogate of primary productivity, within c . 100 km × 100 km cells across all continents, estimating the mean,...

The idea that the number of species within an area is limited by a specific capacity of that area to host species is old yet controversial. Here, we show that the concept of carrying capacity for species richness can be as useful as the analogous concept in population biology. Many lines of empirical evidence indicate the existence of limits of species richness, at least at large spatial and phylogenetic scales. However, avail...

Climate is widely recognised as an important determinant of the latitudinal diversity gradient. However, most existing studies make no distinction between direct and indirect effects of climate, which substantially hinders our understanding of how climate constrains biodiversity globally. Using data from 35 large forest plots, we test hypothesised relationships amongst climate, topography, forest structural attributes (stem ab...

Species richness increases with energy availability, yet there is little consensus as to the exact processes driving this species–energy relationship. The most straightforward explanation is the more‐individuals hypothesis (MIH). It states that higher energy availability promotes a higher total number of individuals in a community, which consequently increases species richness by allowing for a greater number of species with v...

Aim Many important patterns and processes vary across the phylogeny and depend on phylogenetic scale. Nonetheless, phylogenetic scale has never been formally conceptualized, and its potential remains largely unexplored. Here, we formalize the concept of phylogenetic scale, review how phylogenetic scale has been considered across multiple fields and provide practical guidelines for the use of phylogenetic scale to address a ran...

Aim Diversity dynamics remain controversial. Here, we examine these dynamics, together with the ecological factors governing them, across mammalian clades of different ages and sizes, representing different phylogenetic scales. Specifically, we investigate whether the dynamics are bounded or unbounded, biotically or abiotically regulated, stochastic or ecologically deterministic. Location Worldwide. Time period 150 Myr. Major...

Aim One of the fundamental tools in biogeography is the classification of the Earth surface into spatially coherent units based on assemblage distinctiveness. However, spatial coherence of biogeographical regions may be scale‐dependent, that is, it may change with changing the size of spatial units used. We ask (1) how the clusters resulting from the classification of animal assemblages at different spatial scales differ in th...

Aim To separate the effect of overall resource level from the effect of seasonality on avian clutch size to test A shmole's hypothesis that birds have larger clutch sizes in seasonal environments due to high per capita food availability during the breeding season. Location S outh A frica and L esotho. Methods We used a large‐scale environmental gradient to test the effects of maximum resource availability and resource seasonal...

Species that inhabited Europe during the Late Quaternary were impacted by temperature changes and early humans, resulting in the disappearance of half of the European large mammals. However, quantifying the relative importance that each factor had in the extinction risk of species has been challenging, mostly due to the spatio‐temporal biases of fossil records, which complicate the calibration of realistic and accurate ecologi...

Aim To compare macroecological patterns between bird communities of E uropean cities and regional species assemblages in the surrounding landscape, and to reveal geographical trends in the urbanization of native avifauna. Location Forty‐one towns and cities in continental E urope. Methods We compiled data on the species richness and community composition of urban avifauna from 41 E uropean city breeding bird atlases, and of sp...

Energy equivalence, the notion that population energy flux is independent of body mass, has become a key concept in ecology. We argue that energy equivalence is not an ecological ‘rule’, as claimed, but a flawed concept beset by circular reasoning. In fact, the independence of mass and energy flux is a null hypothesis. We show that our mechanistic understanding of size–density relationships ( SDRs ) follows directly from this...

Aim We test the prediction that beta diversity (species turnover) and the decay of community similarity with distance depend on spatial resolution (grain). We also study whether patterns of beta diversity are related to variability in climate, land cover or geographic distance and how the independent effects of these variables depend on the spatial grain of the data. Location Europe, Great Britain, Finland and Catalonia. Metho...

The most pervasive species‐richness pattern, the latitudinal gradient of diversity, has been related to Rapoport's rule, i.e., decreasing latitudinal extent of species' ranges toward the equator. According to this theory, species can have narrower tolerances in more stable climates, leading to smaller ranges and allowing coexistence of more species. We show, using a simple geometric model, that the postulated decrease of speci...