Land‐use change causes community turnover via local extinction and colonisation of species, driving biotic homogenization or heterogenization at larger spatial scales. Quantification of these processes has focused on beta‐diversity metrics, which upweight rarity and overlook the role of widespread species. A key knowledge gap is understanding the impact of land‐use change on both rare and widespread species—zeta‐diversity—allo...

Conspecific density dependence (CDD) in plant populations is widespread, most likely caused by local‐scale biotic interactions, and has potentially important implications for biodiversity, community composition, and ecosystem processes. However, progress in this important area of ecology has been hindered by differing viewpoints on CDD across subfields in ecology, lack of synthesis across CDD‐related frameworks, and misunderst...

Aim Analyses of the relationships between evolutionary history, environmental constraints and associated trait variances can reveal how species distributions were shaped. Phylogenetic comparative models can be used to disentangle the relative roles of spatial and phylogenetic factors in explaining trait variances. Here, we analyse variances in plant traits and environmental variables of the widely distributed and early divergi...

A key assumption underlying any management practice implemented to aid wildlife conservation is that it will have similar effects on target species across the range it is applied. However, this basic assumption is rarely tested. We show that predictors [nearly all associated with agri‐environment scheme (AES) options known to affect European birds] had similar effects for 11 bird species on sites with differing farming practic...