Aim Phylogenetic diversity patterns are increasingly being used to better understand the role of ecological and evolutionary processes in community assembly. Here, we quantify how these patterns are influenced by scale choices in terms of spatial and environmental extent and organismic scales. Location E uropean A lps. Methods We applied 42 sampling strategies differing in their combination of focal scales. For each resulting...

Aim Metacommunity theories attribute different relative degrees of importance to dispersal, environmental filtering, biotic interactions and stochastic processes in community assembly, but the role of spatial scale remains uncertain. Here we used two complementary statistical tools to test: (1) whether or not the patterns of community structure and environmental influences are consistent across resolutions; and (2) whether and...

Aim Understanding the stability of realized niches is crucial for predicting the responses of species to climate change. One approach is to evaluate the niche differences of populations of the same species that occupy regions that are geographically disconnected. Here, we assess niche conservatism along thermal gradients for 26 plant species with a disjunct distribution between the A lps and the A rctic. Location E uropean A l...

The Convention on Biological Diversity ( CBD ) aims at the conservation of all three levels of biodiversity, that is, ecosystems, species and genes. Genetic diversity represents evolutionary potential and is important for ecosystem functioning. Unfortunately, genetic diversity in natural populations is hardly considered in conservation strategies because it is difficult to measure and has been hypothesised to co‐vary with spec...

The pace of on‐going climate change calls for reliable plant biodiversity scenarios. Traditional dynamic vegetation models use plant functional types that are summarized to such an extent that they become meaningless for biodiversity scenarios. Hybrid dynamic vegetation models of intermediate complexity (hybrid‐ DVM s) have recently been developed to address this issue. These models, at the crossroads between phenomenological...

Aim Species specialization, which plays a fundamental role in niche differentiation and species coexistence, is a key biological trait in relation to the responses of populations to changing environments. Species with a limited niche breadth are considered to experience a higher risk of extinction than generalist species. This work aims to measure the degree of specialization in the regional flora of the French Alps and test w...