Aim Deep‐diving cetaceans are oceanic species exposed to multiple anthropogenic pressures including high intensity underwater noise, and knowledge of their distribution is crucial to manage their conservation. Due to intrinsic low densities, wide distribution ranges and limited presence at the sea surface, these species are rarely sighted. Pooling data from multiple visual surveys sharing a common line‐transect methodology can...

Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate‐induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this issue for lowland tropical ecosystems. Here we investigate whether the floristic and functional composition of intact lowland Amazonian forests have been changing by evaluating records from 106...

Aim Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to characterize the forest canopy from remotely sensed data, a gap remains between aerial and field inventories. To close this gap, we propose a new pan‐tropical model to predic...

Soil microbial biomass is a key determinant of carbon dynamics in the soil. Several studies have shown that soil microbial biomass significantly increases with plant species diversity, but it remains unclear whether plant species diversity can also stabilize soil microbial biomass in a changing environment. This question is particularly relevant as many global environmental change ( GEC ) factors, such as drought and nutrient...

Adaptation to changing environments often requires novel traits, but how such traits directly affect the ecological niche remains poorly understood. Multiple plant lineages have evolved C 4 photosynthesis, a combination of anatomical and biochemical novelties predicted to increase productivity in warm and arid conditions. Here, we infer the dispersal history across geographical and environmental space in the only known species...

On 6 December 2010, an extra-tropical storm reached Atlantic Canada, causing coastal flooding due to high water levels being driven toward the north shore of Chaleur Bay. The extent of flooding was identified in the field along the coastline at Maria using DGPS. Using the assumption that the maximum elevation of flooded areas represents the combination of astronomical tide, storm surge and wave runup, which is the maximum elev...

Aim Processes and variables measured in ecology are almost always spatially autocorrelated, potentially leading to the choice of overly complex models when performing variable selection. One way to solve this problem is to account for residual spatial autocorrelation ( RSA ) for each subset of variables considered and then use a classical model selection criterion such as the A kaike information criterion ( AIC ). However, thi...

Summary Magnetotactic bacteria ( MTB ) are capable of synthesizing intracellular organelles, the magnetosomes, that are membrane‐bounded magnetite or greigite crystals arranged in chains. Although MTB are widely spread in various ecosystems, few axenic cultures are available, and only freshwater M agnetospirillum spp. have been genetically analysed. Here, we present the complete genome sequence of a marine magnetotactic spiril...

Dendritic ecological networks ( DEN s) are a unique form of ecological networks that exhibit a dendritic network topology (e.g. stream and cave networks or plant architecture). DEN s have a dual spatial representation; as points within the network and as points in geographical space. Consequently, some analytical methods used to quantify relationships in other types of ecological networks, or in 2‐D space, may be inadequate fo...