Aim Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated with either geographic regions or edaphic forest types. Location Amazonia. Taxon A...

Current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming majority of known animal species, and as such can provide key insights into processes governing biodiversity. Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches are now emerging as powerful tools to overcome limitations in the avail...

Islands make up a large proportion of Earth's biodiversity, yet are also some of the most sensitive systems to environmental perturbation. Biogeographic theory predicts that geologic age, area, and isolation typically drive islands' diversity patterns, and thus potentially impact non‐native spread and community homogenization across island systems. One limitation in testing such predictions has been the difficulty of performin...

Aim To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoocho...

Background MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography has been a foundation for obtaining testable predictions from models of community assembly and for developing models that integrate across scales and disciplines. Historically, however, these developments have focused on integration across ecological and macroevolutionary scales and on predicting patterns of species richness, abundance distributions, trait data an...

Aim Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and field inventories. To close this gap, we propose a new pan‐tropical model to predic...

Recent theoretical advances have hypothesized a central role of habitat persistence on population genetic structure and resulting biodiversity patterns of freshwater organisms. Here, we address the hypothesis that lotic species, or lineages adapted to comparably geologically stable running water habitats (streams and their marginal habitats), have high levels of endemicity and phylogeographic structure due to the persistent na...

The habitat template concept applied to a freshwater system indicates that lotic species, or those which occupy permanent habitats along stream courses, are less dispersive than lentic species, or those that occur in more ephemeral aquatic habitats. Thus, populations of lotic species will be more structured than those of lentic species. Stream courses include both flowing water and small, stagnant microhabitats that can provid...

Aim We examine spatial and temporal patterns of diversification among flightless weevils in the genus Rhyncogonus (Curculionidae: Entiminae), with respect to their passive mode of dispersal by rafting or upon birds and the geological context of Pacific island archipelagos. Location Archipelagos and islands of the Pacific Ocean, especially the South Pacific and Hawaii. Methods Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequence data were us...

Urbanization and agricultural intensification of landscapes are important drivers of global change, which in turn have direct impacts on local ecological communities leading to shifts in species distributions and interactions. Here, we illustrate how human‐altered landscapes, with novel ornamental and crop plant communities, result not only in changes to local community diversity of floral‐dependent species, but also in shifts...

Spatial and environmental heterogeneity are major factors in structuring species distributions in alpine landscapes. These landscapes have also been affected by glacial advances and retreats, causing alpine taxa to undergo range shifts and demographic changes. These nonequilibrium population dynamics have the potential to obscure the effects of environmental factors on the distribution of genetic variation. Here, we investigat...

Alpine environments underwent dramatic transformation during glacial–interglacial cycles, with the consequence that geographical, ecological and demographic changes of alpine populations provided the opportunity for formation of neoendemic species. Several biogeographical models have been proposed to account for the unique history of alpine populations, with different expectations of genetic divergence and speciation. The expa...

Growth of alpine glaciers during the Pleistocene had profound effects on montane landscapes in North America and the organisms now inhabiting alpine ecosystems. Biogeography of this region has often been viewed as a system of sky islands despite the fact that species richness patterns deviate from a strict island biogeographic model. One explanation is that alpine species are not in equilibrium because of late Quaternary geogr...

The flora and fauna of oceanic islands have inspired research since the early scientific explorations. Islands can be considered ‘nature's test tubes’— simple systems with multiple replicates. Our research has used the simplicity of island systems to understand ecological community dynamics and to compare the properties of island communities with those in more complex mainland systems. Here, we present three topics: (i) curren...

Global warming is predicted to affect the evolutionary potential of natural populations. We assessed genetic diversity of 25 populations of desert bighorn sheep ( Ovis canadensis nelsoni ) in southeastern California, where temperatures have increased and precipitation has decreased during the 20th century. Populations in low‐elevation habitats had lower genetic diversity, presumably reflecting more fluctuations in population s...

Male‐killing bacteria are generally thought to attain low to intermediate prevalence in natural populations, with only mild effects on the host population sex ratio. This view was recently challenged by reports of extremely high infection frequencies in three butterfly species, raising the prospect that male killers, by making males rare, might drive many features of host ecology and evolution. To assess this hypothesis, it is...