Species often associate with specific habitat characteristics, resulting in patchy distributions, whereby they only occupy a proportion of available habitat. Understanding which characteristics species require is a valuable tool for informing conservation management. We investigated the associations of eleven species of day-flying Lepidoptera larvae and their foodplants with habitat characteristics within calcareous grassland...

Climate change is set to become one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss worldwide, with extreme weather events projected to increase in frequency. Ectothermic animals such as insects are at particular risk, especially when they are isolated and unable to move through the landscape to track suitable climate. To protect such taxa, it is important to understand how they are impacted by extreme weather events and whether ma...

Climate change is a major threat to species worldwide, yet it remains uncertain whether tropical or temperate species are more vulnerable to changing temperatures. To further our understanding of this, we used a standardised field protocol to (1) study the buffering ability (ability to regulate body temperature relative to surrounding air temperature) of neotropical (Panama) and temperate (the United Kingdom, Czech Republic an...

Abstract Climate change affects butterflies in many ways, influencing the timing of emergence and reproduction, habitat preferences, and behaviour. The small blue ( Cupido minimus Fuessley, 1775) is highly specialised in its host plant requirements, feeding on the seeds of a single species, kidney vetch ( Anthyllis vulneraria ), on which the larvae occur singly to avoid cannibalism. The butterfly is likely to be vulnerable to...

Tropical forests play a major role in the carbon cycle of the terrestrial biosphere. Recent field studies have provided detailed descriptions of the carbon cycle of mature tropical forests, but logged or secondary forests have received much less attention. Here, we report the first measures of total net primary productivity ( NPP ) and its allocation along a disturbance gradient from old‐growth forests to moderately and heavil...