Restoring and conserving seagrass ecosystems are considered a climate solution due to their exceptional ability to store carbon in their sediments. However, restoration and financing efforts are held back by the inherent challenges of quantifying and monitoring carbon storage in sediments and the highly variable nature of seagrass carbon stocks globally. This research explores the application of machine learning (ML) models, u...

North American arvicoline rodents have long been considered to have high biogeographic, biochronologic, and paleoecological value. They provide relative dating of faunal assemblages when absolute dating is not possible and contribute to paleobiome characterization. However, the scientific value of Arvicolinae is often limited by the level of taxonomic identification achievable by morphological analyses. ZooMS (zooarchaeology b...

Aim Non‐native plants have the potential to harm ecosystems. Harm is classically related to their distribution and abundance, but this geographical information is often unknown. Here, we assess geographical commonness as a potential indicator of invasive status for non‐native flora in the United States. Geographical commonness could inform invasion risk assessments across species and ecoregions. Location Conterminous United St...

Aim Beta diversity quantifies the similarity of ecological assemblages. Its increase, known as biotic homogenisation, can be a consequence of biological invasions. However, species occurrence (presence/absence) and abundance‐based analyses can produce contradictory assessments of the magnitude and direction of changes in beta diversity. Previous work indicates these contradictions should be less frequent in nature than in theo...

Many analyses of biological responses to climate rely on gridded climate data derived from weather stations, which differ from the conditions experienced by organisms in at least two respects. First, the microclimate recorded by a weather station is often quite different to that near the ground surface, where many organisms live. Second, the temporal and spatial resolutions of gridded climate datasets derived from weather stat...

Aim The climate tolerances of many species are broader than those estimated from current native ranges. Indeed, the niches of some Afromontane trees are up to 50% larger after incorporation of fossil data. This expansion could reduce estimates of species' future range loss owing to climate change but also implies strong non‐climatic limitations on species' current ranges. One such limitation is land use, which fossil data sugg...

Aim Climate and land‐use change will have a dramatic impact on future ecosystems through alterations to species ranges and community composition. When forming conservation strategies, correlative species distribution models are often created to assess risks for individual species. These models are based on the assumption of climatic equilibrium, such that the modern range is representative of the full range of conditions under...

Aim Our understanding of potential ranges for native and non‐native species is often based on their current geographic distributions. Non‐native species have had less time than co‐occurring native species to expand their ranges following introduction, so non‐native ranges may under‐represent suitable conditions. Therefore it is often assumed that species distribution models will predict disproportionately smaller potential ran...

The long‐finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas , is a social, pelagic odontocete distributed widely in the cold temperate waters of the North Atlantic. Despite genetic, morphometric, physiological and observational studies, it remains unclear whether any population substructure exists. We have used eight highly polymorphic microsatellite loci to analyse samples from four disparate sampling sites: USA East Coast (Cape Cod), We...