Aim There has been a wide interest in the effect of biotic interactions on species' occurrences and abundances at large spatial scales, coupled with a vast development of the statistical methods to study them. Still, evidence for whether the effects of within‐trophic‐level biotic interactions (e.g. competition and heterospecific attraction) are discernible beyond local scales remains inconsistent. Here, we present a novel hypo...

Aim This study investigates whether, and how, the composition of riparian bird communities has been affected by climate warming and habitat change. Although these two forces act separately, their respective contributions are rarely examined. Moreover, while the response of a given community may be a function of latitude and altitude, most studies have focused on these gradients separately. Riparian ecosystems are an opportunit...

Aim Understanding the relative contribution of different species interactions in shaping community assembly has been a pivotal aim in community ecology. Biotic interactions are acknowledged to be important at local scales, although their signal is assumed to weaken over longer distances. We examine the relationship between positive, neutral and negative pairwise bird abundance distributions and the phylogenetic and functional...

The spatial tracking of climatic shifts is frequently reported as a biodiversity response to climatic change. However, species’ range shifts are often idiosyncratic and inconsistent with climatic shift predictions. At the community scale, this discrepancy can be measured by comparing the spatial shift in the relative composition of cold‐ vs. warm‐adapted species in a local assemblage [the community temperature index ( CTI )] w...

The local spatial congruence between climate changes and community changes has rarely been studied over large areas. We proposed one of the first comprehensive frameworks tracking local changes in community composition related to climate changes. First, we investigated whether and how 12 years of changes in the local composition of bird communities were related to local climate variations. Then, we tested the consequences of t...

Aim We disentangle three facets of species commonness (local abundance, geographical range size, degree of habitat generalization) to identify how species segregate along these axes and how each of these facets determines the relative functional originality of each species (i.e. the mean trait distance of a species with others). At the community level we test whether changes in the relative abundances of species with different...

Aim To define biome‐scale hotspots of phylogenetic and functional mammalian biodiversity ( PD and FD , respectively) and compare them with ‘classical’ hotspots based on species richness ( SR ) alone. Location Global. Methods SR , PD and FD were computed for 782 terrestrial ecoregions using the distribution ranges of 4616 mammalian species. We used a set of comprehensive diversity indices unified by a recent framework incorpora...

Aim We assessed the temporal trends of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversities in the F rench avifauna over the last two decades. Additionally, we investigated whether and how this multifaceted approach to biodiversity dynamics can reveal an increasing similarity of local assemblages in terms of species, traits and/or lineages. Location France. Methods We analysed a large‐scale dataset that recorded annual changes i...

Aim Investigations into how different facets of biodiversity are related has become a central research agenda in ecology. Here, we use a large‐scale and high‐resolution data set on bird distribution to examine the robustness of the relationships between species diversity and functional or phylogenetic diversity. Location F rance Methods We measured the functional and phylogenetic diversity of 1914 bird assemblages monitored ov...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 1030–1040 Abstract Functional and phylogenetic diversity are increasingly quantified in various fields of ecology and conservation biology. The need to maintain diversity turnover among sites, so‐called beta‐diversity, has also been raised in theoretical and applied ecology. In this study, we propose the first comprehensive framework for the large‐scale mapping of taxonomic, phylogenetic and function...

Temperate species are projected to experience the greatest temperature increases across a range of modelled climate change scenarios, and climate warming has been linked to geographical range and population changes of individual species at such latitudes. However, beyond the multiple modelling approaches, we lack empirical evidence of contemporary climate change impacts on populations in broad taxonomic groups and at continent...

Aim Worldwide, functional homogenization is now considered to be one of the most prominent forms of biotic impoverishment induced by current global changes. Yet this process has hardly been quantified on a large scale through simple indices, and the connection between landscape disturbance and functional homogenization has hardly been established. Here we test whether changes in land use and landscape fragmentation are associa...

We studied the community richness and dynamics of birds in landscapes recently affected by urbanization to test the prediction that biotic communities living in degraded landscapes are increasingly composed of generalist species. We analyzed bird communities in 657 plots monitored by the French Breeding Bird Survey from 2001 to 2005, accounting for the probability of species detection and spatial autocorrelation. We used an in...

Each species generally has a close relationship with one or more habitats and can therefore be classified as either specialist or generalist. We studied whether specialist and generalist species are spatially distributed independently of each other. Repeating the analysis for 100 of the most frequent terrestrial bird species recorded over the 10 000 sampled sites of the French Breeding Bird survey, we found that specialists we...