Investigating how trophic interactions influence the β‐diversity of meta‐communities is of paramount importance to understanding the processes shaping biodiversity distribution. Here, we apply a statistical method for inferring the strength of spatial dependencies between pairs of species groups. Using simulated community data generated from a multi‐trophic model, we showed that this method can approximate biotic interactions...

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...