Aim Identifying the underlying drivers of species’ distributional dynamics is critical for predicting change and managing biological diversity. While anthropogenic factors such as climate change can affect species distributions through time, other naturally occurring ecological processes can also have an influence. Theory predicts that interactions between species can influence distributional dynamics, yet empirical evidence r...

Aim We examined (1) the relationships between aboveground tropical forest C storage, biodiversity and environmental drivers and (2) how these relationships inform theory concerning ecosystem function and biodiversity. Experiments have shown that there is a positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but intense debate exists on the underlying mechanisms. While some argue that mechanisms such as niche...

Aim In recent years evidence has accumulated that plant species are differentially sorted from regional assemblages into local assemblages along local‐scale environmental gradients on the basis of their function and abiotic filtering. The favourability hypothesis in biogeography proposes that in climatically difficult regions abiotic filtering should produce a regional assemblage that is less functionally diverse than that exp...

Theoretical analyses and experimental studies of synthesized assemblages indicate that under particular circumstances species diversity can enhance community productivity through niche complementarity. It remains unclear whether this process has important effects in mature natural ecosystems where competitive feedbacks and complex environmental influences affect diversity–productivity relationships. In this study, we evaluated...

Systematic protocols that use decision rules or scores are seen to improve consistency and transparency in classifying the conservation status of species. When applying these protocols, assessors are typically required to decide on estimates for attributes that are inherently uncertain. Input data and resulting classifications are usually treated as though they are exact and hence without operator error. We investigated the im...

Climate change poses a challenge to the conventional approach to biodiversity conservation, which relies on fixed protected areas, because the changing climate is expected to shift the distribution of suitable areas for many species. Some species will persist only if they can colonize new areas, although in some cases their dispersal abilities may be very limited. To address this problem we devised a quantitative method for id...

Many different systems are used to assess levels of threat faced by species. Prominent ones are those used by the World Conservation Union, NatureServe, and the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission (now the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission). These systems assign taxa a threat ranking by assessing their demographic and ecological characteristics. These threat rankings support the legislative protection o...

Risk‐ranking protocols are used widely to classify the conservation status of the world's species. Here we report on the first empirical assessment of their reliability by using a retrospective study of 18 pairs of bird and mammal species (one species extinct and the other extant) with eight different assessors. The performance of individual assessors varied substantially, but performance was improved by incorporating uncertai...

Ecologists have long sought to understand the relationships among species diversity, community productivity and invasion by non‐native species. Here, four long‐term observational datasets were analyzed using repeated measures statistics to determine how plant species richness and community resource capture (i.e. productivity) influenced invasion. Multiple factors influenced the results, including the metric used to quantify in...

Loss of biodiversity is one of the world's overriding environmental challenges. Reducing those losses by creating reserve networks is a cornerstone of global conservation and resource management. Historically, assembly of reserve networks has been ad hoc , but recently the focus has shifted to identifying optimal reserve networks. We show that while comprehensive reserve network design is best when the entire network can be im...

Creating networks of nature reserves to protect areas rich in biodiversity from the adverse impacts of anthropogenic change is a critical and urgent task. We illustrate the skewed geographical and size distributions of protected areas in the Western Hemisphere. For instance, 811 of 1413 reserves in the Western Hemisphere are smaller than 10 km 2 , and 35% of the total area of these reserves is in Alaska. We compile ranges for...

Despite numerous claims that population viability analysis ( PVA ) makes reliable predictions of the relative risks of extinction, there is little evidence to support this assertion. To assess the veracity of the claim, we investigated uncertainty in the relative predictions of a PVA model with simulation experiments. We used a stochastic Ricker model to investigate the reliability of predicted changes in risks of decline in r...

The application of systematic and quantitative approaches to conservation planning is increasing, but the quality and quantity of data available to planners remains inadequate. We used two databases on bat species distributions at 25 sites in Paraguay to illustrate some of the effects of the spatial scale of sampling and data quality on decisions about reserve siting. We used a simulated annealing algorithm to identify alterna...