Macroecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Broad scale patterns in the distribution of animal community functional properties could be determined by climate and disrupted by human activities. Here the authors show global patterns in large-mammal trophic structure related to climate variation, which human activities simplify in predictable ways.

    • Manuel Mendoza
    •  & Miguel B. Araújo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The capacity to predict zoonotic disease outbreaks is hampered by data availability and complex relationships between humans, wildlife, and the environment. Here the authors present a modelling framework that identifies potential high-risk locations for Ebola outbreaks under various climatic, demographic, and land use scenarios.

    • David W. Redding
    • , Peter M. Atkinson
    •  & Kate E. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deep learning has the potential to identify ecological relationships between environment and complex phenotypes that are difficult to quantify. Here, the authors use deep learning to analyse associations among elevation, climate and phenotype across ~2000 moth species in Taiwan.

    • Shipher Wu
    • , Chun-Min Chang
    •  & Sheng-Feng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large brains are expected to be beneficial in variable environments by enabling flexible behavioral responses. Here, the authors show that relative brain size in birds is bimodally distributed in colder, seasonal environments, suggesting that both large and small brains can be adaptive solutions to harsh conditions.

    • Trevor S. Fristoe
    •  & Carlos A. Botero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The functions of color in fungi are not well characterized. Here, Krah and colleagues investigate the color of mushroom assemblages across Europe and show relationships with climate, nutritional mode (saprotrophic and ectomycorrhizal) and seasonality.

    • Franz-Sebastian Krah
    • , Ulf Büntgen
    •  & Claus Bässler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multiple drivers maintain unique species assemblages at multiple biogeographic scales. Here, the authors show that the freezing line is a key barrier generating evolutionary differences in temperate and tropical bird communities across a steep elevational gradient in the Himalaya.

    • Alexander E. White
    • , Kushal K. Dey
    •  & Trevor D. Price

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Animal diversity, measured in numbers of species, is rapidly being lost to extinction. Here, Cooke et al. show that the diversity of ecological strategies employed by land mammals and birds is also expected to narrow towards small, fecund, insect-eating generalists with fast-paced life histories.

    • Robert S. C. Cooke
    • , Felix Eigenbrod
    •  & Amanda E. Bates

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Could similar ecological and biogeographic drivers explain the distributions of biological diversity and human cultural diversity? The authors explore ecological correlates of human language diversity, finding strong support for a role of high year-round productivity but less support for landscape features.

    • Xia Hua
    • , Simon J. Greenhill
    •  & Lindell Bromham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attaining global biodiversity projections requires the use of various species distribution and climate modelling and scenario approaches. Here the authors report that model choice can significantly impact results, with particularly uncertainty arising from choice of species distribution model and emission scenario.

    • Wilfried Thuiller
    • , Maya Guéguen
    •  & Niklaus E. Zimmermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pollinator loss is a concern but data on their status is lacking. Here Powney et al. use occupancy modelling to estimate the degree of loss in wild bee and hoverfly species across Great Britain, and report a 55% decline in upland species and a 12% increase in dominant crop pollinators.

    • Gary D. Powney
    • , Claire Carvell
    •  & Nick J. B. Isaac

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Given the size differences between the autotrophs in aquatic and terrestrial systems, it is unclear whether the same metabolic scaling patterns apply in both groups. Here the authors unify previous datasets and show that plankton and trees follow similar power-law scaling of individual size distributions.

    • Daniel M. Perkins
    • , Andrea Perna
    •  & Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phylogenetic turnover measures the evolutionary distance between species assemblages. Here, Saladin et al. analyze the phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods after controlling for geographic distance and show greater roles of environment in recent evolutionary history for ectotherms than for endotherms.

    • Bianca Saladin
    • , Wilfried Thuiller
    •  & Niklaus E. Zimmermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been recent interest in understanding why the biodiversity-productivity relationship varies among studies and across scales. Here Fei et al. show that climatic variation drives forest biodiversity-productivity relationships at large spatial scales, whilst biotic and abiotic factors are important in given climate units.

    • Songlin Fei
    • , Insu Jo
    •  & Eckehard G. Brockerhoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flaviviruses have emerged or re-emerged in several regions, but factors underlying emergence are incompletely understood. Here, Pandit et al. identify potential sylvatic reservoirs of flaviviruses and, in combination with vector distribution data, predict regions of global vulnerability.

    • Pranav S. Pandit
    • , Megan M. Doyle
    •  & Christine K. Johnson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The biogeographic drivers of reptile diversity are poorly understood relative to other animal groups. Here, using a dataset of distributions of African squamates, the authors show that environmental filtering explains diversity in stressful habitats while competition explains diversity in benign habitats.

    • Till Ramm
    • , Juan L. Cantalapiedra
    •  & Johannes Müller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Islands may impose a distinct set of selective pressures, leading to the repeated evolution of certain traits. Here, Sayol et al. compare brain sizes of more than 1900 bird species in a phylogenetic context, finding a consistent trend for in situ evolution of increased brain size in island birds.

    • Ferran Sayol
    • , Philip A. Downing
    •  & Daniel Sol

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evidence for and implications of biodiversity change remain widely debated. Jarzyna and Jetz demonstrate a strong and varying scale dependence of avian taxonomic and functional diversity, highlighting the importance of scale when assessing biodiversity change.

    • Marta A. Jarzyna
    •  & Walter Jetz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multiple hypotheses have been proposed for the declining biodiversity gradient between the tropics and poles. Here, the authors compile and analyze geographic data for all ant species and large-scale phylogenies, suggesting that diversification time drives the latitudinal diversity gradient in ants.

    • Evan P. Economo
    • , Nitish Narula
    •  & Benoit Guénard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Body size is hypothesised to be a major determinant of β-diversity in passively-dispersing marine organisms. Here, Villarino et al. show that plankton body size determines rates of dispersal along marine currents, with shorter dispersal and higher species spatial turnover in larger organisms.

    • Ernesto Villarino
    • , James R. Watson
    •  & Guillem Chust

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global maps of biogeographic realms help to understand the geological and ecological processes that gave rise to species distributions, yet a marine realm map has been lacking. Here, Costello et al. use a database of over 65,000 species to reveal 30 marine biogeographic realms and high rates of species endemicity.

    • Mark J. Costello
    • , Peter Tsai
    •  & Chhaya Chaudhary

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mass extinctions are thought to produce ‘disaster faunas’, communities dominated by a small number of widespread species. Here, Button et al. develop a phylogenetic network approach to test this hypothesis and find that mass extinctions did increase faunal cosmopolitanism across Pangaea during the late Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic.

    • David J. Button
    • , Graeme T. Lloyd
    •  & Richard J. Butler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Species richness increases with area sampled, potentially confounding biodiversity patterns from the fossil record. Here, the authors standardize spatial sampling to control for this bias and show that terrestrial vertebrate diversification was bounded during the Mesozoic but that equilibria were reset following the K/Pg extinction.

    • Roger A. Close
    • , Roger B.J. Benson
    •  & Richard J. Butler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Alien species of animals and plants can invade new regions of the earth. This study performs a global analysis of temporal dynamics and spatial patterns of alien species introductions over the past 200 years, and reports no saturation in the rate at which these invasion are increasing.

    • Hanno Seebens
    • , Tim M. Blackburn
    •  & Franz Essl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental variation has been hypothesized to favour the evolution of large brains capable of adjusting behaviour to changing circumstances. Here, Sayolet al. find that across more than 1200 bird species, species with relatively large brains are indeed associated with more variable habitats.

    • Ferran Sayol
    • , Joan Maspons
    •  & Daniel Sol

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Explaining species richness patterns is a key question in ecology. Peterset al. sample diverse plant and animal groups across elevation on Mt. Kilimanjaro to show that, while disparate factors drive distributions of individual taxa, diversity overall decreases with elevation, mostly driven by effects of temperature.

    • Marcell K. Peters
    • , Andreas Hemp
    •  & Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plants with the capability to reproduce easily without mates and pollinators could have an advantage when colonizing new territory. Here, Razanajatovoet al. use a global database to infer that flowering plants capable of selfing have become naturalized in a larger number of regions than those that must outcross.

    • Mialy Razanajatovo
    • , Noëlie Maurel
    •  & Mark van Kleunen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extinction after habit loss does not occur immediately. Here, the authors develop a model and estimate how fast extinction debt is paid off after habit loss, and show a temporal profile of species diversity decays in a power-law fashion with a half-life increasing slowly with habit size and area.

    • John M. Halley
    • , Nikolaos Monokrousos
    •  & Despoina Vokou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biological range expansions and invasions can be affected by rapid evolution. Here the authors show an evolutionary increase of dispersal during range expansions and an increase of population densities from range cores to range margins in microcosm experiments with a freshwater ciliate.

    • Emanuel A. Fronhofer
    •  & Florian Altermatt

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