Marine microbial ecology aims to link microbial communities to the geochemical processes they drive. Molecular techniques have provided a view of the huge complexity of microbial communities and their metabolic potential, however, the information these approaches give about the geochemical processes is limited. Here, we combined geochemical and 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing analyses to spatially link dominant microbial taxa wit...

Aim We evaluated the effects of forest island size, isolation and area in the landscape driving temporal changes of insect biodiversity in a mountaintop forest archipelago. We expected that (i) in smaller, less isolated forest islands, changes in insect composition are more prominent, primarily driven by gains over time; (ii) more forest in the landscape leads to increased gains of vagile species over time, regardless of fores...

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which...

Secondary forests (SFs) regenerating on previously deforested land account for large, expanding areas of tropical forest cover. Given that tropical forests rank among Earth’s most important reservoirs of carbon and biodiversity, SFs play an increasingly pivotal role in the carbon cycle and as potential habitat for forest biota. Nevertheless, their capacity to regain the biotic attributes of undisturbed primary forests (UPFs) r...

Aim The two main hypotheses about the Neotropical palaeovegetation, namely that of Amazonian refugia by Haffer and of the Pleistocene arc by Prado and Gibbs, are still constantly debated. We offer new insights on this debate using ecological niche modelling with combined climate–soil predictors to test both hypotheses, reconstruct the palaeovegetation of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; 21 ka) and Mid‐Holocene (Mid‐H; 6 ka) and...

Land‐cover change and ecosystem degradation may lead to biotic homogenization, yet our understanding of this phenomenon over large spatial scales and different biotic groups remains weak. We used a multi‐taxa dataset from 335 sites and 36 heterogeneous landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon to examine the potential for landscape‐scale processes to modulate the cumulative effects of local disturbances. Biotic homogenization was hig...