Aim Elevational gradients are excellent systems to study biodiversity variation, yet the ecosystem functions performed by animals along these gradients are poorly understood. We assessed tropical elevational patterns of ant‐mediated seed removal, insect predation and the phylogenetic diversity of the local ant assemblages performing these functions as well as the effects of climate and productivity. Location Southeast Brazil,...

Animals are integrated into the wider ecosystem via their foraging and behavior. The compensation hypothesis predicts that animals target their foraging efforts (i) toward nutrients that are scarce in the environment and (ii) toward nutrients that are not present in the usual diet of species, which varies across trophic levels. Understanding how foraging for resources varies locally, such as across habitat strata, and trophic...

Aim To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoocho...

Advancing functional ecology depends fundamentally on the availability of data on reproductive traits, including those from tropical plants, which have been historically underrepresented in global trait databases. Although some valuable databases have been created recently, they are mainly restricted to temperate areas and vegetative traits such as leaf and wood traits. Here, we present Rock n' Seeds, a database of seed functi...

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...

Amazonian rainforests, once thought to be pristine wilderness, are increasingly known to have been widely inhabited, modified, and managed prior to European arrival, by human populations with diverse cultural backgrounds. Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are fertile soils found throughout the Amazon Basin, created by pre‐Columbian societies with sedentary habits. Much is known about the chemistry of these soils, yet their zoology...

The fact that different phylogenomic data sets can lead to highly supported but inconsistent results suggest that conflict among gene trees in real data sets could be severe. We provide here a detailed exploration of gene tree space to investigate the relationships in Hymenoptera based on data obtained by Johnson et al. ( Current Biology , 2013, 23, 2058), in which ants and Apoidea (bees and spheciform wasps) were recovered as...

Aim Thousands of kilometres of rainforest edges are created every year through forest fragmentation, but we have little knowledge of the impacts of edges on spatial patterns of species turnover and nestedness components of β‐diversity. Location A quasi‐experimental landscape in the north‐east Brazilian Amazon. Methods We sampled dung beetles and ants using a sampling design based on a fractal series of equilateral triangles th...

Aim To evaluate the extent to which ant species richness in Neotropical savannas varies with macrogeographic variables, and to identify the potential climatic drivers of such variation. Location The Cerrado savanna biome of central Brazil, in a region spanning ca. 20° of latitude and 18°of longitude. Methods Standardized sampling of the arboreal and ground‐dwelling faunas was performed in 29 well‐preserved savanna sites using...