Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on ecosystem function. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that reductions in prey availability may influence population dynamics. Yet quantifying direct effects at large spatial scales is difficult, both due to data limitations and because correlations may reflect shared responses to environmental ch...

Satellite-based remote sensing approaches provide a cost-efficient means to collect information on the world’s forests and to repeatedly survey large, or inaccessible, forest areas. However, it may not always be possible to ground truth–associated findings using direct ecological field surveys conducted by trained forest scientists. Local ecological knowledge (LEK) is an alternative form of data which could be used to compleme...

The evolution of animals and their gut symbionts is a complex phenomenon, obscured by lability and diversity. In social organisms, transmission of symbionts among relatives may yield systems with more stable associations. Here, we study the history of a social insect symbiosis involving cephalotine ants and their extracellular gut bacteria, which come predominantly from host‐specialized lineages. We perform multi‐locus phyloge...