Urbanisation is a major driver of biodiversity change; however, its impact on soil macrodetritivore communities and their functional composition still remains overlooked. Terrestrial isopods, key soil macrodetritivores involved in decomposition processes, are increasingly used as model organisms to assess environmental change. In this study, we investigated the influence of landscape-scale urbanisation and local environmental...

Butterflies and plant species are widely used as model systems in biodiversity and conservation research. However, little is known about spatial patterns of butterfly diversity linked to plant communities across coastal dune ecotones. We explored the relation between butterfly and vegetation diversity in a Mediterranean protected dune system in Central Italy. We sampled butterfly and plant communities on shifting and fixed dun...

The species-area relationship (SAR) is one of the most investigated patterns in ecology and conservation biology, yet there is no study testing how different levels of urbanization influence its shape. Here we tested the impact of urbanization on avian SARs along a rural-urban gradient using the breeding birds of Rome (Central Italy). We divided the city into 360 cells of 1 km 2 . Each cell was classified as rural, suburban or...

Aim Species–area relationships (SARs) are among the best investigated patterns in ecology, yet the shape of the function that should describe SARs and the biological meaning of the function parameters are disputed. Elevational gradients offer the opportunity of investigating how biodiversity responds to large variations in environmental characteristics within small geographical areas. We asked which function describes SARs at...

Aim Ecogeographical patterns have been widely studied in endothermic vertebrates, but relatively few studies have simultaneously examined patterns and causes of gradients in species richness, range size and body size in ectothermic insects. We examined patterns in species richness, mean range size and mean body size of ground beetle assemblages across the biogeographical provinces of Northern Europe, a region that was mostly c...

Since von Humboldt, recognizing and using elevational subdivisions is at the core of biogeographical and ecological studies in mountain ecosystems. However, despite the large use of vegetational belts, their conceptual definition and practical identification appear to be surprisingly loose and inconsistent. Many authors use variations in climatic conditions to identify elevational belts. These belts are useful to set a framewo...

Aim We examined the responses of the beta diversity of aquatic and terrestrial beetles to ecogeographical variables, including climate, land cover and land use, across Northern Europe. Location Northern Europe (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland). Methods Information on the occurrence of ground beetles and diving beetles across Northern European biogeographical provinces was collated from literature sources. Beta diversity wa...

Aim The species–area relationship ( SAR ) is often modelled by the linearized power function log S = log c + z log A , where S is species richness, A is area, log c is the intercept and z is the slope. Although investigating how c and z values vary across taxa and archipelagos can provide insights into the biology of the SAR , this approach has many caveats. In this study, we aim to clarify how and why SAR s should be properly...

Recent reviews of the meaning of the word ‘chorotype’ in biogeography have led to contrasting definitions and a confusion of concepts. This is because ‘chorotype’ has been used by different authors to express two different concepts: (1) groups of species with overlapping ranges (overall distributions) and (2) groups of species with a similar distribution within a certain area. To avoid confusion, I suggest the term ‘global cho...

Aim Unpartitioned dissimilarity indices such as the Sørensen index (β sor ) tend to categorize areas according to species number. The use of turnover indices, such as the Simpson index (β simp ), may lead to the loss of important information represented by the nestedness component (β nest ). Recent studies have suggested the importance of integrating nestedness and turnover information. We evaluated this proposition by compari...