While China harbors rich biodiversity, it is facing concurrent challenges from rapid socio‐economic growth and severe biodiversity loss. Additionally, critical gaps in knowledge about the country's biodiversity trends have persisted for a long time because of a lack of a national‐scale biodiversity monitoring program. Using a decade (2011–2020) of avian monitoring data from 142 sites and 864 species under the China Biodiversit...

Wildlife trade poses a major threat to biodiversity, yet the drivers determining which species are traded are not fully understood. Through a comprehensive collection of official and online trade data, we applied a binomial test to identify families that contain an unexpectedly large or small number of traded species. We also analyzed which factors predispose reptile species to be traded and explored whether traded species wer...

Food webs represent an important nexus between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, yet considering changes in food webs around the world has been limited by data availability. Previous studies have predicted food web collapses and coextinction, but changes in food web structure have been less investigated under climate warming and anthropogenic pressures on a global scale. We systematically amassed information about specie...

Host–pathogen dynamics are influenced by many factors that vary locally, but models of disease rarely consider dynamics across spatially heterogeneous environments. In addition, theory predicts that dispersal will influence host–pathogen dynamics of populations that are linked, although this has not been examined empirically in natural systems. We examined the spatial dynamics of a patchy population of tiger moths and its bacu...

Colonization and extinction at local and regional scales, and gains and losses of patches are important processes in the spatiotemporal dynamics of metacommunities. However, analytical challenges remain in quantifying such spatiotemporal dynamics when species extinction‐colonization and patch gain and loss processes act simultaneously. Recent advances in network analysis show great potential in disentangling the roles of colon...

Aims Identifying major reasons for species imperilment is a necessary step for conservation, but the degree to which we can generalize is hard for species‐rich yet less‐studied taxa, such as lizards. Here, we aim to bridge the gap by providing comprehensive analyses of the correlates and processes of species extinction and threats for global lizards. Location Global. Time period Current. Major taxa studied Lizards. Methods We...

There is increasing awareness of the negative ecological and environmental effects of widespread use of pesticides on the landscape. Spillover or drift of pesticides from agricultural areas has been shown to impact species health, reproduction, and trophic dynamics through both direct and indirect mechanisms. Neonicotinoid insecticides are associated with observed declines of insectivorous and grassland birds, and these enviro...

Scatter‐ and larder hoarding are the primary strategies of food‐hoarding animals and have important implications for plant‐animal interactions and plant recruitment. However, their origins and influencing factors have not been fully investigated across a wide range of taxa. Our systematic literature search amassed data for 183 seed‐hoarding rodent species worldwide and tested relationships of seed‐hoarding behaviours with phyl...

The interaction between endogenous dynamics and exogenous environmental variation is central to population dynamics. Although investigations into the effects of changing mean climate are widespread, changing patterns of variation in environmental forcing also affect dynamics in complex ways. Using wavelet and time series analyses, we identify a regime shift in the dynamics of a moth species in California from shorter to longer...

Hypotheses about the mechanisms of community assembly suggest that biotic and abiotic filters constrain species establishment through selection on their functional traits. It is unclear how differences in traits influence the niche dimensions of closely related bird species when they coexist in spatiotemporally heterogeneous environments. Further, it is necessary to take into account their participation in mixed‐species flocks...

Understanding how biodiversity and interaction networks change across environmental gradients is a major challenge in ecology. We integrated metacommunity and metanetwork perspectives to test species’ functional roles in bird–plant frugivory interactions in a fragmented forest landscape in Southwest China, with consequences for seed dispersal. Availability of fruit resources both on and under trees created vertical feeding str...

Aim Most studies of diversity changes along elevational gradients show a synchronous change in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity, such that all decline with elevation or show a mid‐elevation peak. However, some studies show asynchronous changes, which challenge us to explain their assembly. Here we used functional trait variation and niche spacing to test the roles of environmental filtering and competition‐driv...

Climate change can have strong effects on species interactions and community structure. Temperature‐dependent effects on predator–prey interactions are a major mechanism through which these effects occur. To understand the net effects of predator attack rates and dynamic windows of prey vulnerability, we examined the impacts of temperature on the interaction of a caterpillar ( Arctia virginalis ) and its ant predator ( Formica...

Aim We tested the effects of season and migratory status (residents‐versus‐seasonal migrants) on island biogeography of bird assemblages through partitioning beta diversity into richness and turnover components and community nestedness metrics. We predicted that total beta diversity, the richness component of beta diversity and community nestedness will be lower for bird assemblages in winter than in summer, and lowest of all...

Climate is widely recognized as an important factor that affects temporal and spatial patterns of occurrence and abundance of herbivorous insects, although the ecological mechanisms responsible are poorly understood. We found that precipitation and standing water were positively correlated with locations and years of high abundance of caterpillars of the ranchman's tiger moth, Platyprepia virginalis . We analyzed 30 years of s...

Aim To determine how taxonomic level and spatial scale affect the phylogenetic structure of species assemblages across four classes of terrestrial vertebrates. Location Mainland C hina. Methods Using species distribution data from M ammalia, A ves, R eptilia and A mphibia, including 2153 species from 2105 counties and 1632 species from 295 nature reserves across mainland C hina, we analysed the phylogenetic structure of co‐occ...

Despite the ubiquity of ontogenetic niche shifts, their drivers and consequences are poorly understood. Different nutritional requirements and stage‐specific physiological limitations have often been offered as explanations for these life history features, but emerging work has demonstrated that top‐down factors may also be important. We studied the roles of predation and associational refuge in ontogenetic niche shifts for a...

This Special Issue of Ecology Letters presents contributions from an international meeting organised by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ( CNRS ) and Ecology Letters on the broad theme of ecological effects of global environmental change. The objectives of these articles are to synthesise, hypothesise and illustrate the ecological effects of environmental change drivers and their interactions, including habitat los...

Spatial dynamic theories such as source–sink models frequently describe habitat‐specific demographies, yet there are surprisingly few field studies that have examined how and why interacting species vary in their dynamics across multiple habitat types. We studied the spatial pattern of interaction between a chewing herbivore and its primary larval host plant in two habitat types. We found that the interaction between an arctii...

Natural ecosystems often show highly productive habitats that are clustered in space. Environmental disturbances are also often nonrandomly distributed in space and are either intrinsically linked to habitat quality or independent in occurrence. Theoretical studies predict that configuration and aggregation of habitat patch quality and disturbances can affect metacommunity composition and diversity, but experimental evidence i...