Hosting 1460 plant and 126 vertebrate endemic species, the Great Escarpment (hereafter, Escarpment) forms a semi‐circular “amphitheater” of mountains girdling southern Africa from arid west to temperate east. Since arid and temperate biota are usually studied separately, earlier studies overlooked the biogeographical importance of the Escarpment as a whole. Bats disperse more widely than other mammalian taxa, with related spec...

Climate change and urbanisation are among the most pervasive and rapidly growing threats to biodiversity worldwide. However, their impacts are usually considered in isolation, and interactions are rarely examined. Predicting species' responses to the combined effects of climate change and urbanisation, therefore, represents a pressing challenge in global change biology. Birds are important model taxa for exploring the impacts...

Birds breeding in urban environments have lower reproductive output compared to rural conspecifics, most likely because of food limitation. However, which characteristics of urban environments may cause this deficiency is not clear. Here, we investigated how tree composition within urban territories of passerine birds is associated with breeding probability and reproductive success. We used 7 years of data of breeding occupanc...

Aim When interpreting genetic patterns across a landscape it is surprisingly difficult to disentangle the effects of landscape connectivity from those of species biology. Here, the spatial distributions of genetic variation of two sympatric elephant‐shrew species, the western rock elephant‐shrew ( Elephantulus rupestris ) and the round‐eared elephant‐shrew ( Macroscelides proboscideus ), are determined and compared. We selecte...