Aim To test whether forest extent and recent forest‐cover change are associated with avian phylogenetic diversity and community‐level evolutionary value across islands. Location Seven islands spanning Borneo and Wallacea in the Malay Archipelago. Taxon Terrestrial birds. Methods We sampled 1410 sites (2010–2022). We calculated phylogenetic diversity (PD), mean phylogenetic distance (MPD), mean nearest taxon distance (MNTD) and...

Forest conversion for agriculture is a major cause of tropical biodiversity loss, but its impacts vary with spatial scale. Higher species turnover in forests than in farmland means that land‐use change causes greater biodiversity loss at broader than at local scales, yet broad‐scale assessments are scarce. Phylogenetic diversity is increasingly prioritised in conservation to protect evolutionary history under global change, ye...

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...

Size differences between males and females are common across the tree of life (termed sexual size dimorphism; SSD), and have fundamental implications for ecology, life history and behaviour of both sexes. Conventionally, SSD is thought to evolve in response to sex‐specific sexual selection but more recent work suggests that ecological processes can also promote sex‐differences in size. Here, we provide a global test for the ro...

Aim Pollination is an essential stage of angiosperm reproduction, and the mode of pollination plays a major role in driving evolutionary and ecological responses of plants to environmental changes. However, the effects of climate, evolutionary history and floral traits (i.e. plant sexual systems) on pollination mode variation remain unclear. Here, we explored the biogeographic patterns in pollination mode frequency and tested...

Habitat conversion is a major driver of tropical biodiversity loss, but its effects are poorly understood in montane environments. While community‐level responses to habitat loss display strong elevational dependencies, it is unclear whether these arise via elevational turnover in community composition and interspecific differences in sensitivity or elevational variation in environmental conditions and proximity to thermal thr...

Our knowledge of the factors affecting species abundances is mainly based on time‐series analyses of a few well‐studied species at single or few localities, but we know little about whether results from such analyses can be extrapolated to the community level. We apply a joint species distribution model to long‐term time‐series data on British bird communities to examine the relative contribution of intra‐ and interspecific de...

Angiosperm sexual systems are fundamental to the evolution and distribution of plant diversity, yet spatiotemporal patterns in angiosperm sexual systems and their drivers remain poorly known. Using data on sexual systems and distributions of 68453 angiosperm species, we present the first global maps of sexual system frequencies and evaluate sexual system evolution during the Cenozoic. Frequencies of dioecy and monoecy increase...

Aim Amphibians exhibit unusually diverse reproductive modes, including a wide array of parental care strategies. The evolutionary drivers of this diversity, however, remain unclear. Here, we investigate three major factors that might predict interspecific variation in parental care strategies: climate, intrasexual selection and social environment. We hypothesize that some forms of care evolved to cope with harsh conditions, su...

Aim Sexual systems strongly influence angiosperm evolution and play important roles in community assembly and species responses to climate change. However, geographical variation in proportions of different sexual systems (dioecy, monoecy and hermaphroditism) in response to changes in climate, life‐history traits and evolutionary age remains poorly understood. Here, we map the geographical variation in proportions of different...

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...

Aim The phylogenetic constraint hypothesis of flowering phenology states that closely related species flower at similar times of the year. We test this hypothesis for the C hinese angiosperm flora and assess additional effects of growth form, deciduousness, pollination mode and fruit type. We further examine whether the phylogenetic conservatism of flowering phenology tends to increase from tropical to temperate latitudes. Loc...

Aim For most higher‐order taxa, species diversity peaks sharply in the moist tropics and declines rapidly at higher latitudes. However, the mechanisms driving this latitudinal gradient are numerous, remain uncertain and are even undocumented in some important major clades such as the grasses. Grasses are a cosmopolitan, important plant family with more than 11,000 species world‐wide. Our aims were: to investigate the latitudin...

Positive abundance–occupancy relationships (AORs) are among the most general macroecological patterns: locally common species are regionally widespread, locally rare species are regionally restricted. In a recent contribution, Wilson ( Global Ecology and Biogeography , 2011, 20 , 193–202) made three claims: (1) that AORs are critically dependent on the method used to calculate average abundance; (2) averaging abundance over oc...

Ecology Letters (2010) Abstract The Janzen‐Connell hypothesis is a leading explanation for plant‐species diversity in tropical forests. It suggests that specialized natural enemies decrease offspring survival at high densities beneath parents, giving locally rarer species an advantage. This mechanism, in its original form, assumes that density dependence is overcompensating: mortality must be disproportionately high at the hig...

Ecological models suggest that high diversity can be generated by purely niche‐based, purely neutral or by a mixture of niche‐based and neutral ecological processes. Here, we compare the degree to which four contrasting hypotheses for coexistence, ranging from niche‐based to neutral, explain species richness along a body mass niche axis. We derive predictions from these hypotheses and confront them with species body‐mass patte...

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...