Category Archives: Highlighted Papers

During the last 54 000 years, the range of red deer in Europe and the Ural Mountains changed in response to climate oscillations, generally decreasing in cooler periods and expanding in warmer periods, largely in agreement with the Expansion-Contraction model. However, these processes were asynchronous and differed in western and central regions when compared to easternContinue reading “Responses of red deer to climatic oscillations”

How ancient river systems, geological barriers and climatic changes in the Western Ghats influenced speciation of balitorid loaches Of the many endemic and evolutionarily distinct freshwater fish lineages of the Western Ghats Biodiversity Hotspot, the mountain loach genus Bhavania comprises a biogeographically fascinating group. Its morphological similarities to the sucker-loaches of Indo-China and Sunda IslandsContinue reading “Miocene diversification of mountain loaches”

Corroborating, refining, or refuting species’ modelled historical distributions can require innovation in datatypes and the synthesis of diverse kinds of information from sometimes unexpected sources. Ecological niche and species distribution models are tools currently applied in several fields of biology and other disciplines. These models use algorithms to correlate species presence data with environmental layersContinue reading “Recovering palaeo-distributions from rock art”

We use landscape data to understand spatial patterns of diversity of one of the smallest groups of insects: thrips. The study was performed in Reunion island, a small volcanic island of the Indian Ocean. The dramatic changes in elevation, abiotic conditions and anthropisation allowed us to explore multiple variables affecting diversity revealing why, despite moreContinue reading “Satellite images to understand the diversity of minute insects”

Local biological diversity, also known as alpha diversity, has three different components: the number of species in a given area (taxonomic diversity), the number of distinct traits that these species have (functional diversity) and their evolutionary distinctiveness (phylogenetic diversity). The relationships among these components of diversity vary across geography reflecting the differences in eco-evolutionary processesContinue reading “Dimensions of amphibian alpha diversity in the New World”

Mouse-goats, ‘demons of the forest’, and other insular bovids have short and robust limbs. Why?  The ‘low gear’ hypothesis had never been tested until we decided to fill this gap with a quantitative investigation of the causal forces influencing the acquisition of this peculiar type of locomotion. Above: Skulls of a tamaraw (Bubalus mindorensis), aContinue reading “The mystery of ‘low gear’ locomotion”

Within a global biodiversity hotspot, one of the highest latitude true coral reefs in the world, the oldest European structure in Australia, a rich and colourful marine environment, perhaps the most infamous murderous mutiny in marine history, intensive human destruction of habitat and still little known to the most of the world, the Houtman AbrolhosContinue reading “Marooned on the Houtman Abrolhos”

From curiosity to community assembly: how a birder’s frustration opened the door to a new journey of discovery about taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of ants on islands. When I started my Ph.D. career and went to the Thousand Island Lake (TIL) to do fieldwork for the first time in 2014, I was attracted toContinue reading “How did ant communities assemble on reservoir islands?”

Ecoregions are central to global modeling of earth systems & development of conservation plans. There is great variability across taxonomic groups and regions of the world in how strongly ecoregions described community composition. Two years ago, a team of us published a study entitled ‘A global test of ecoregions’ (Smith et al., 2018). In thatContinue reading “A deep dive on ecoregions”

How to tease apart the evolutionary mechanisms underlying global biodiversity patterns. A major question in evolution and ecology is why biodiversity is so unevenly distributed on Earth. This geographic pattern of global diversity has been extensively analyzed in plants and vertebrates, and has been suggested to be attributed to climatic and topographic variables. However, environmentalContinue reading “Different evolutionary routes to becoming diversity hotspots”