Conservation planning has long prioritized local species richness (α diversity) but has rarely explicitly integrated species turnover (β diversity) into actionable strategies. Areas with high species turnover lack recognition and protection despite their ecological importance. We devised a simple, standardized, and scalable approach for mapping species turnover. We rasterized species ranges, then counted the range edges of eac...

Local studies show upslope shifts in the distribution of tropical birds in response to warming temperatures. Unanswered is whether these upward shifts occur regionally across many species. We considered a nearly 2000‐km length of the Northern Andes, where deforestation, temperature, and extreme weather events have increased during the past decades. Range‐restricted bird species are particularly vulnerable to such events and oc...

Long‐term studies to understand biodiversity changes remain scarce—especially so for tropical mountains. We examined changes from 1911 to 2016 in the bird community of the cloud forest of San Antonio, a mountain ridge in the Colombian Andes. We evaluated the effects of past land‐use change and assessed species vulnerability to climate disruption. Forest cover decreased from 95% to 50% by 1959, and 33 forest species were extirp...

As a landscape becomes increasingly fragmented through habitat loss, the individual patches become smaller and more isolated and thus less likely to sustain a local population. Metapopulation theory is appropriate for analyzing fragmented landscapes because it combines empirical landscape features with species‐specific information to produce direct information on population extinction risks. This approach contrasts with descri...

Article impact statement : Understanding causes and consequences of disease range shifts can help mitigate negative effects of such shifts on lions and other wildlife.

Human actions challenge nature in many ways. Ecological responses are ineluctably complex, demanding measures that describe them succinctly. Collectively, these measures encapsulate the overall ‘stability’ of the system. Many international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, broadly aspire to maintain or enhance ecological stability. Such bodies frequently use...

The giant panda attracts disproportionate conservation resources. How well does this emphasis protect other endemic species? Detailed data on geographical ranges are not available for plants or invertebrates, so we restrict our analyses to 3 vertebrate taxa: birds, mammals, and amphibians. There are gaps in their protection, and we recommend practical actions to fill them. We identified patterns of species richness, then ident...

A key measure of humanity's global impact is by how much it has increased species extinction rates. Familiar statements are that these are 100–1000 times pre‐human or background extinction levels. Estimating recent rates is straightforward, but establishing a background rate for comparison is not. Previous researchers chose an approximate benchmark of 1 extinction per million species per year (E/MSY). We explored disparate lin...

Aim MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography proposes that the rate at which species colonize an island depends on the island's isolation (distance effect), whereas the local extinction rate depends on its area (area effect). Alternative hypotheses recognize that area can affect the colonization rate (target effect) and that isolation can affect the extinction rate (rescue effect) and, moreover, that these relation...

We aspired to set conservation priorities in ways that lead to direct conservation actions. Very large‐scale strategic mapping leads to familiar conservation priorities exemplified by biodiversity hotspots. In contrast, tactical conservation actions unfold on much smaller geographical extents and they need to reflect the habitat loss and fragmentation that have sharply restricted where species now live. Our aspirations for dir...

Habitat loss is the principal threat to species. How much habitat remains—and how quickly it is shrinking—are implicitly included in the way the International Union for Conservation of Nature determines a species’ risk of extinction. Many endangered species have habitats that are also fragmented to different extents. Thus, ideally, fragmentation should be quantified in a standard way in risk assessments. Although mapping fragm...

Predicting whether the ranges of tropical species will shift to higher elevations in response to climate change requires models that incorporate data on topography and land use. We incorporated temperature gradients and land‐cover data from the current ranges of species in a model of range shifts in response to climate change. We tested four possible scenarios of amphibian movement on a tropical mountain: movement upslope thro...

Theories suggest that food webs might consist of groups of species forming ‘blocks’, ‘compartments’ or ‘guilds’. We consider ecological networks – subsets of complete food webs – involving species at adjacent trophic levels. Reciprocal specializations occur when (say) a pollinator (or group of pollinators) specializes on a particular flower species (or group of such species) and vice versa. Such specializations tend to group s...

Aim We consider three hypotheses – MacArthur and Wilson’s island biogeography theory (IBT), Lack’s habitat diversity idea and the ‘target effect’– that explain the pattern of decreased species richness on small and distant islands. Location We evaluate these hypotheses using a detailed dataset on the occurrence and abundance of terrestrial birds on nine islands off the coast of Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Methods Unli...

Researchers predict that new infrastructure development will sharply increase the rate and extent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. There are no predictions, however, of which species it will affect. We used a spatially explicit model that predicts the location of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2020 on the basis of historical patterns of deforestation following infrastructure development. We overlaid the pred...

Small geographical range size is the single best predictor of threat of extinction in terrestrial species. Knowing how small a species' range has to be before authorities consider it threatened with extinction would allow prediction of a species' risk from continued deforestation and warming climates and provide a baseline for conservation and management strategies aspiring to mitigate these threats. To determine the threshold...

Many ecologists believe birds disappear from tropical forest fragments because they are poor dispersers. We test this idea using a spatially explicit capture data base from the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project near Manaus, Brazil. We measure bird movements directly, over relatively large scales of space and time, both before and after landscape fragmentation. We found that species which disappear from fragments...