Animal gut microbiomes are critical to host physiology and fitness. The gut microbiomes of fishes—the most abundant and diverse vertebrate clade—have received little attention relative to other clades. Coral reef fishes, in particular, make up a wide range of evolutionary histories and feeding ecologies that are likely associated with gut microbiome diversity. The repeated evolution of herbivory in fishes and mammals also allo...

Different host species associate with distinct gut microbes in mammals, a pattern sometimes referred to as phylosymbiosis. However, the processes shaping this host specificity are not well understood. One model proposes that barriers to microbial transmission promote specificity by limiting microbial dispersal between hosts. This model predicts that specificity levels measured across microbes is correlated to transmission mode...

Protists are abundant, diverse and perform essential functions in soils. Protistan community structure and its change across time or space are traditionally studied at the species level but the relative importance of the processes shaping these patterns depends on the taxon phylogenetic resolution. Using 18S rDNA amplicon data of the Cercozoa, a group of dominant soil protists, from an agricultural field in western Germany, we...

Summary Protists are abundant and play key trophic functions in soil. Documenting how their trophic contributions vary across large environmental gradients is essential to understand and predict how biogeochemical cycles will be impacted by global changes. Here, using amplicon sequencing of environmental DNA in open habitat soil from 161 locations spanning 2600 m of elevation in the Swiss Alps (from 400 to 3000 m), we found th...

Aim Worldwide distribution patterns of living animals are structured in multiple zoogeographical regions, characterized by faunas with homogeneous composition that are separated by sharp boundaries. These zoogeographical regions can differ depending on the considered animal group, probably because they have distinct characteristics such as dispersal, metabolism, or evolutionary history, and thus divergent responses to major bi...

Summary It is unclear how host‐associated microbial communities will be affected by future environmental change. Characterizing how microbiota differ across sites with varying environmental conditions and assessing the stability of the microbiota in response to abiotic variation are critical steps towards predicting outcomes of environmental change. Intertidal organisms are valuable study systems because they experience extrem...

Aim More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the hypothesis that local assemblages result from a series of abiotic and biotic filters applied to regional species pools and that these filters leave predictable signals in observed diversity patterns. In theory, statistical comparisons of expected and o...

Aim The positive effect of primary productivity on animal species richness is one of the most conspicuous ecological features on Earth. However, less is known about the relationship between ecosystems primary productivity and the evolutionary history of biota. Here, we analyse how global primary productivity relates to the phylogenetic structure of vertebrate assemblages, and to the distribution of the most distinct lineages a...

At high altitude, the reduced availability of thermal energy and oxygen poses major challenges to organisms. Different species or populations have evolved similar solutions to these challenges, such as blood flow regulation in animals (Bouverot, 1985). Previous studies investigating such convergent adaptations have primarily looked at changes in host genomes (e.g., see Scheinfeldt & Tishkoff, 2010), but have rarely considered...

Investigating how trophic interactions influence the β‐diversity of meta‐communities is of paramount importance to understanding the processes shaping biodiversity distribution. Here, we apply a statistical method for inferring the strength of spatial dependencies between pairs of species groups. Using simulated community data generated from a multi‐trophic model, we showed that this method can approximate biotic interactions...

Aim We aimed to assess the relative influence of the historical and contemporary processes determining global patterns of current β‐diversity. Specifically, we quantified the relative effects of contemporary climate and historical plate tectonics on β‐diversity at different phylogenetic scales. Location Global. Time Period Contemporaneous. Major taxa studied Mammals and birds. Methods We analysed the current β‐diversity patter...

Phylogenetic Generalized Least Square (PGLS) is the tool of choice among phylogenetic comparative methods to measure the correlation between species features such as morphological and life‐history traits or niche characteristics. In its usual form, it assumes that the residual variation follows a homogenous model of evolution across the branches of the phylogenetic tree. Since a homogenous model of evolution is unlikely to be...

In analogy to the species–area relationship (SAR), one of the few laws in ecology, the phylogenetic diversity–area relationship (PDAR) describes the tendency of phylogenetic diversity (PD) to increase with area. Although investigating PDAR has the potential to unravel the underlying processes shaping assemblages across spatial scales and to predict PD loss through habitat reduction, it has been little investigated so far. Focu...

Aim To define biome‐scale hotspots of phylogenetic and functional mammalian biodiversity ( PD and FD , respectively) and compare them with ‘classical’ hotspots based on species richness ( SR ) alone. Location Global. Methods SR , PD and FD were computed for 782 terrestrial ecoregions using the distribution ranges of 4616 mammalian species. We used a set of comprehensive diversity indices unified by a recent framework incorpora...