Category Archives: Highlighted Papers

Area, environmental heterogeneity, scale and the conservation of alpine diversity. Above: Phyteuma hemisphericum from the Sierra de Villabandín, Cantabrian Mountains, Spain; photograph by Borja Jiménez-Alfaro This project was an extension of our work on the relative importance of geographic distance and environmental difference to the beta diversity of alpine plant communities (Malanson et al. 2022).Continue reading “Island theory is still relevant to alpine biogeography”

Rivers sometimes change their way, caused by geological events. During such river rearrangement, what happened to the inhabitants? We investigated the genetic traces remaining in genomes of the descendants and look for a way to find unidentified geological events. Above: An upper reach of mountain stream on Honshu Island, Japan. Honshu Island, the main islandContinue reading “Elucidating river history through population genetics of an aquatic organism”

Global body size distributions in dragonflies and damselflies are shaped by temperature and predators Above: A model replica of a fossil dragonfly (Urogomphus giganteus) in Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) that lived about 140 million years ago. Dragonflies and damselflies have an unusually rich fossil record, compared to other insect groups. Photo: Erik Svensson. Dragonflies andContinue reading “Explaining global body size variation in dragonflies and damselflies: temperature or predators?”

“As with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all and had stuck to the wreck.” (Darwin 1859) Above: ChorthippusContinue reading “Poor flyers in the sky (-islands)”

Using historical records to reconstruct how species presence/absence and altitudinal ranges have changed between 1815 and today. Above: The northern slope of Tenerife island, with the Orotava valley, The sea of clouds and the Teide peak (3718 m,) climbed by Humboldt & Bonpland (1799) and von Buch & Smith climbed (1815) (Photo: José María Fernández-Palacios).Continue reading “Vegetation on Mt. Teide (Tenerife) during Humboldt’s time and now”

In this blog post, I discuss some of the “behind the scenes” factors in writing “Linking mode of seed dispersal and climatic niche evolution in flowering plants”, including our main motivation and some challenges we had to overcome with data curation and trait evolution modeling in the project Above: Miconia sp. (Melastomataceae), a diverse lineageContinue reading “Overcoming challenges in measuring how seed dispersal and climatic niche evolution are connected in plants”

Patterns and drivers of environmental filtering and habitat matching are context dependent on a macroecological scale. Above: Panther Creek, Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia. Understanding how communities are assembled is the ‘what we do’ of community ecology: we want to know which species are present and why. With this guiding our work, we wanted to understandContinue reading “A new take on environmental filtering and habitat matching”

Vultures travel over large distances; identifying where they are most at risk is imperative to effective conservation work. Vultures are most at risk from illegal poisoning when they are foraging and feeding. Using telemetry data from tagged vultures, we identified these risky behaviours from GPS data and the spaces vultures choose to do them toContinue reading “Wandering Vultures: Understanding behaviour and space-use for conservation”

Increasing predation pressure by pinnipeds through the late Cenozoic drove Nautilus into its present-day refuge in the deep tropical Indo-West Pacific Ocean Above: Reconstruction of the fossil Nautilus taiwanus inhabiting deeper waters of the tropical Indo-West Pacific Ocean about 20 million years ago. Illustration by Cheng-Han Sun. Predator-prey interactions are important drivers of evolution. ForContinue reading “How seals made Nautilus a ‘Living Fossil’“

How did dispersal and habitat changes over 20,000 years shape the genetic structure of alpine species? We investigated by simulating the spatial dynamics of populations since the glaciation in combination with a large genomic data set on northern chamois. Above: Northern chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) inhabit steep terrain slopes. They can escape predators in steep slopesContinue reading “How landscape connectivity shapes genetic structure of alpine species over time”