How to tease apart the mechanisms behind patterns of diversity in the wild. A major challenge in ecology and evolution is to unravel the processes that generate and maintain the uneven distribution of life on Earth. A common approach is to regress species richness, the number of species counted at a place, on variables representingContinue reading “Niche filling dynamics in the Australian Wet Tropics”
Category Archives: Highlighted Papers
Why some taxa are more species-rich towards higher latitudes
How niche conservatism in colonizing and sedentary species shape a latitudinal gradient. Niche conservatism has often been used as an elegant explanation for why there are more species in the tropics—i.e. most taxa originated in the tropics, had more time to diversify therein, and tended to retain ancestral climatic affinities making range shifts out ofContinue reading “Why some taxa are more species-rich towards higher latitudes”
A worldwide tour of grasses; using herbaria for ecological research
Grasses are extremely cosmopolitan in distribution and comprise one of the largest biomes on Earth. They are important carbon stores, account for large amounts of terrestrial primary productivity, are home to much of the worlds mammalian diversity and contribute to the livelihoods of an estimated one fifth of the world population. Grasslands are culturally, economicallyContinue reading “A worldwide tour of grasses; using herbaria for ecological research”
Urban invaders
How efforts to understand diversity in urban areas could change perceptions of biodiversity in cities and increase green spaces. Studies about community assembly typically focus on local community properties along natural-rural-urban gradients and neglect regional processes. As such, it remains unclear which functional traits are filtered when going from a regional pool of potential colonistsContinue reading “Urban invaders”
Mountainous Matters
Writing the perspective Why Mountains Matter for Biodiversity (Perrigo et al. 2020) was a chance for myself, along with Carina Hoorn and Alexandre Antonelli, to explore and distill some of the ideas that came up while editing a book that was published two years ago: Mountains, Climate and Biodiversity (Hoorn et al., 2018). One of many early versions ofContinue reading “Mountainous Matters”
Flying foxes – out of Wallacea
How efforts to understand origins and diversity led to efforts to conserve and protect the world’s largest bats ————————COVER STORY 47(2):Tsang, SM, Wiantoro, S, Veluz, MJ, et al. (2020) Dispersal out of Wallacea spurs diversification of Pteropus flying foxes, the world’s largest bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera). J. Biogeography 47(2): 527– 537. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13750———————— Long-distance dispersal (LDD) is often regarded as aContinue reading “Flying foxes – out of Wallacea”
Biogeography in the Age of Big Data
Journal of Biogeography, 47:1 Special Issue https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/13652699/2020/47/1 ALL SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLES ARE FREE ACCESS for 2020 & 2021 Between 10-13th April, 2018, the annual meeting of the Specialist Group for Macroecology of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland convened in Zurich, Switzerland around the topic of “Macroecology in the age of big data”. TheContinue reading “Biogeography in the Age of Big Data”
Introducing: Highlighted Papers
Every month, each new issue of the Journal of Biogeography (JBI) includes at least two highlighted articles—the Editors’ Choice and the paper associated with the cover image—and periodically we highlight a topic with a series of papers as part of a special issue. Our intention on the blog is to communicate additional aspects of these,Continue reading “Introducing: Highlighted Papers”