As the global protected area (PA) network expands to meet international targets, it is important to assess whether traditional reliance on public land will suffice for projected PA growth or whether other tenures, such as Indigenous or pastoral lands, may increasingly contribute. Another consideration is whether the relative importance of different tenures varies depending on the specific goals of the PA network. We used the m...

Effective conservation of migratory species relies on habitat protection throughout their annual cycle. Although protected areas (PAs) play a central role in conservation, their effectiveness at conserving habitats across the annual cycle of migratory species has rarely been assessed. We developed seasonal ecological niche models for 418 migratory butterfly species across their global distribution to assess whether they were a...

Aim Macroevolutionary analysis is increasingly being used to study biodiversity responses to climate change, for example by using phylogenetic node ages to infer periods of diversification, or phylogenetic reconstruction of traits to infer adaptation to particular stresses. Here we apply a recently developed macroevolutionary method to investigate the responses of a diverse plant genus, Acacia , to increasing aridity and salin...

Aim Lizard assemblages vary greatly in taxonomic, ecological and phenotypic diversity, yet the mechanisms that generate and maintain these patterns at a macroecological scale are not well understood. We aimed to characterize the ecological and environmental drivers of species richness patterns in the context of macroecological theory for 10 independent lizard radiations. Location Global. Time period Present day. Major taxa Liz...

Aim A positive association between environmental niche breadth and geographic range size across species ( RS ‐ NB association) is considered a major macroecological pattern and a key mechanism explaining differences in commonness and rarity among species. It is typically assumed that niche breadth determines range size. We explore ways in which spurious positive RS ‐ NB associations can arise through sampling artefacts, in the...

Aim Analyses of spatial overlap in species distributions are frequently used to test a range of ecological and evolutionary hypotheses, from the role of competition in community assembly to the geography of speciation. Most studies quantify overlap at one spatial resolution. Here we explore the effects of measuring spatial and niche overlap patterns for the same clade ( Banksia ) at multiple resolutions. Location Australia. Me...

Aim Recent research suggests that the latitudinal diversity gradient ( LDG ) in birds is unlikely to result from faster diversification in the tropics. This puts the focus on other mechanisms, such as dispersal, as the primary drivers for the LDG . We aim to distinguish two prominent models, tropical conservatism ( TCH ) and out of the tropics ( OTM ), which make distinct predictions about dispersal across latitudes and the ph...

Aim Understanding extinction on islands is critical for biodiversity conservation. Introduced predators are a major cause of island extinctions, but there have been few large‐scale studies of the complexity of the effects of predators on island faunas, or how predation interacts with other factors. Using a large database of island mammal populations, we describe and explain patterns of island mammal extinctions as a function o...

Aim Islands have often been used as model systems in community ecology. The incorporation of information on phylogenetic relatedness of species in studies of island assemblage structure is still uncommon, but could provide valuable insights into the processes of island community assembly. We propose six models of island community assembly that make different predictions about the associations between co‐occurrences of species...

Aim One of the longest recognized patterns in macroecology, Bergmann’s rule, describes the tendency for homeothermic animals to have larger body sizes in cooler climates than their phylogenetic relatives in warmer climates. Here we provide an integrative process‐based explanation for Bergmann’s rule at the global scale for the mammal order Carnivora. Location Global. Methods Our database comprises the body sizes of 209 species...

Analyses of life‐history, ecological, and geographic trait differences among species, their causes, correlates, and likely consequences are increasingly important for understanding and conserving biodiversity in the face of rapid global change. Assembling multispecies trait data from diverse literature sources into a single comprehensive data set requires detailed consideration of methods to reliably compile data for particula...

Are latitudinal gradients in regional diversity random or biased with respect to body size? Using data for the New World avifauna, I show that the slope of the increase in regional species richness from the Arctic to the equator is not independent of body size. The increase is steepest among small and medium‐sized species, and shallowest among the largest species. This is reflected in latitudinal variation in the shape of freq...

The link between body size and risk of extinction has been the focus of much recent attention. For Australian terrestrial mammals this link is of particular interest because it is widely believed that species in the intermediate size range of 35–5500 g (the “critical weight range”) have been the most prone to recent extinction. But the relationship between body size and extinction risk in Australian mammals has never been subj...