Aim Phylogenetic community structures have traditionally been interpreted through the lens of niche processes, such as environmental filtering and interspecific competition. However, these structures have been continuously shaped over evolutionary time by biogeographical dynamics, a process that is often overlooked. Here, we disentangled the influence of speciation and dispersal on spatial phylogenetic structures using neutral...

Understanding dissolved concentrations of the essential coenzyme thiamin (vitamin B 1 ) can provide insights into the biological controls on highly productive upwelling systems such as the California Current Ecosystem. To connect thiamin availability with microbial communities in the California Current Ecosystem, we measured concentrations of dissolved thiamin and its biochemically related moieties (thiamin congeners) and 16S...

Variability and change in near‐surface air temperature at 17 Antarctic stations is examined using data from the SCAR READER database. We consider the relationships between temperature, and atmospheric circulation, sea ice concentration and forcing by the tropical oceans. All 17 stations have their largest inter‐annual temperature variability during the winter and the annual mean temperature anomalies are dominated by winter te...

Progressive habitat transformation causes global changes in landscape biodiversity patterns, but can be hard to quantify. Rarefaction/extrapolation approaches can quantify within‐habitat biodiversity, but may not be useful for cases in which one habitat type is progressively transformed into another habitat type. To quantify biodiversity patterns in such transformed landscapes, we use Hill numbers to analyse individual‐based s...

Estimating the species, phylogenetic, and functional diversity of a community is challenging because rare species are often undetected, even with intensive sampling. The Good‐Turing frequency formula, originally developed for cryptography, estimates in an ecological context the true frequencies of rare species in a single assemblage based on an incomplete sample of individuals. Until now, this formula has never been used to es...

We introduce a novel framework for conceptualising, quantifying and unifying discordant patterns of species richness along geographical gradients. While not itself explicitly mechanistic, this approach offers a path towards understanding mechanisms. In this study, we focused on the diverse patterns of species richness on mountainsides. We conjectured that elevational range midpoints of species may be drawn towards a single mid...

Based on a sample of individuals, we focus on inferring the vector of species relative abundance of an entire assemblage and propose a novel estimator of the complete species‐rank abundance distribution (RAD). Nearly all previous estimators of the RAD use the conventional “plug‐in” estimator p̂ i (sample relative abundance) of the true relative abundance p i of species i . Because most biodiversity samples are incomplete, the...

Assessing species survival status is an essential component of conservation programs. We devised a new statistical method for estimating the probability of species persistence from the temporal sequence of collection dates of museum specimens. To complement this approach, we developed quantitative stopping rules for terminating the search for missing or allegedly extinct species. These stopping rules are based on survey data f...

We develop a novel statistical approach for classifying generalists and specialists in two distinct habitats. Using a multinomial model based on estimated species relative abundance in two habitats, our method minimizes bias due to differences in sampling intensities between two habitat types as well as bias due to insufficient sampling within each habitat. The method permits a robust statistical classification of habitat spec...

Understanding the causes of spatial variation in species richness is a major research focus of biogeography and macroecology. Gridded environmental data and species richness maps have been used in increasingly sophisticated curve‐fitting analyses, but these methods have not brought us much closer to a mechanistic understanding of the patterns. During the past two decades, macroecologists have successfully addressed technical p...

Biodiversity sampling is labor intensive, and a substantial fraction of a biota is often represented by species of very low abundance, which typically remain undetected by biodiversity surveys. Statistical methods are widely used to estimate the asymptotic number of species present, including species not yet detected. Additional sampling is required to detect and identify these species, but richness estimators do not indicate...

A 14 year integration with a regional atmospheric model has been used to determine the near‐surface climatological wind field over the Antarctic ice sheet at a horizontal grid spacing of 55 km. Previous maps of the near‐surface wind field were generally based on models ignoring the large‐scale pressure‐gradient forcing term in the momentum equation. Presently, state‐of‐the‐art atmospheric models include all pressure‐gradient f...

Species richness is a fundamental measurement of community and regional diversity, and it underlies many ecological models and conservation strategies. In spite of its importance, ecologists have not always appreciated the effects of abundance and sampling effort on richness measures and comparisons. We survey a series of common pitfalls in quantifying and comparing taxon richness. These pitfalls can be largely avoided by usin...