Reply to Rehm: Why rates of upslope shifts in tropical species vary is an open question

Reply to Rehm: Why rates of upslope shifts in tropical species vary is an open question.

Rates of upslope shifts for tropical species depend on life history and dispersal mode.

The recent paper by Freeman and Class Freeman (1) adds to a growing body of literature documenting the upslope distributional shifts of tropical montane species in response to climate change. Armed with just a handful of studies from the tropics, the authors compare upslope shift rates between tropical and nontropical species and conclude that tropical species are, on average, shifting their di...

Reply to Feeley and Rehm: Land-use intensification increases risk of species losses from climate change.

A growing body of evidence challenges the view that species’ ranges are shifting unidirectionally in response to anthropogenic climate change (1). As Feeley and Rehm (2) point out, our resurvey of Chimborazo’s vegetation (3) presents yet another example of the complex dynamics of ongoing range shifts. Although we do find a strong average upslope trend, we also note that several species are lagg...

Coronary revascularisation: why do rates vary geographically in the UK?

OBJECTIVE To explain the reasons for geographical variation in the use of coronary revascularisation in the United Kingdom. DESIGN This was a cross sectional ecological study. SETTING NHS and independent hospitals performing coronary revascularisation for the 11.6 million residents of the south east Thames, East Anglian and north western health regions in England plus Greater Glasgow, Lanar...

Why do species vary in their rate of molecular evolution?

Despite hopes that the processes of molecular evolution would be simple, clock-like and essentially universal, variation in the rate of molecular evolution is manifest at all levels of biological organization. Furthermore, it has become clear that rate variation has a systematic component: rate of molecular evolution can vary consistently with species body size, population dynamics, lifestyle a...