Aim Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated with either geographic regions or edaphic forest types. Location Amazonia. Taxon A...

Dominance of neotropical tree communities by a few species is widely documented, but dominant trees show a variety of distributional patterns still poorly understood. Here, we used 503 forest inventory plots (93,719 individuals ≥2.5 cm diameter, 2609 species) to explore the relationships between local abundance, regional frequency and spatial aggregation of dominant species in four main habitat types in western Amazonia. Altho...

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...

Summary We examined the effect of diet on pre‐hibernation fattening and the gut microbiota of captive arctic ground squirrels ( Urocitellus parryii ). We measured body composition across time and gut microbiota density, diversity and function prior to and after five‐weeks on control, high‐fat, low‐fat (18%, 40% and 10% energy from fat, respectively), or restricted calorie (50% of control) diets. Squirrels fattened at the same...

Recent studies suggest that the growth and fecundity of northern ungulates may be coupled to their summer nutrition. Here, we compare summer dietary nitrogen availability of the five major browse plants (comprising ∼79% of the diet) of moose ( Alces alces ) in Denali National Park and Nelchina Basin, Alaska, USA. In recent years the productivity of Denali moose has been significantly higher than that of Nelchina moose, prompti...