The appeal of trait‐based approaches for assessing environmental vulnerabilities arises from the potential insight they provide into the mechanisms underlying the changes in populations and community structure. Traits can provide ecologically based explanations for observed responses to environmental changes, along with predictive power gained by developing relationships between traits and environmental variables. Despite thes...

Shifts in biodiversity and ecological processes in stream ecosystems in response to rapid climate change will depend on how numerically and functionally dominant aquatic insect species respond to changes in stream temperature and hydrology. Across 253 minimally perturbed streams in eight ecoregions in the western USA , we modeled the distribution of 88 individual insect taxa in relation to existing combinations of maximum summ...

The emerging tephrostratigraphy of NW Europe spanning the last termination (ca. 15–9 ka) provides the potential for synchronizing marine, ice‐core and terrestrial records, but is currently compromised by stratigraphic complications, geochemical ambiguity and imprecise age estimates for some layers. Here we present new tephrostratigraphic, radiocarbon and chironomid‐based palaeotemperature data from Abernethy Forest, Scotland,...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 267–283 Abstract Predicting changes in community composition and ecosystem function in a rapidly changing world is a major research challenge in ecology. Traits‐based approaches have elicited much recent interest, yet individual studies are not advancing a more general, predictive ecology. Significant progress will be facilitated by adopting a coherent theoretical framework comprised of three element...