Insects are important but overlooked components of forest ecosystems in New Zealand. For many insect species, information on foraging patterns and trophic relationships is lacking. We examined diet composition and selectivity in a large-bodied insect, the Auckland tree wētā Hemideina thoracica, in three habitat zones in a lowland New Zealand forest. We asked whether H. thoracica selectively for...

Concerns regarding the long-term viability of threatened and endangered plant species are increasingly warranted given the potential impacts of climate change and habitat fragmentation on unstable and isolated populations. Orchidaceae is the largest and most diverse family of flowering plants, but it is currently facing unprecedented risks of extinction. Despite substantial conservation emphasi...

The metacommunity framework integrates species-specific responses to environmental gradients to detect emergent patterns of mesoscale organization. Abiotic characteristics (temperature, precipitation) and associated vegetation types change with elevation in a predictable fashion, providing opportunities to decouple effects of environmental gradients per se from those of biogeographical or histo...

Aim Elevational gradients distributed across the globe are a powerful test system for understanding biodiversity. Here I use a comprehensive set of bird elevational gradients to test the main drivers of diversity, including sampling, area, mid-domain effect, temperature, temperature and water availability, and hypotheses of evolutionary history. Location Seventy-eight elevational gradients of b...

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) lives in alpine ecosystems Central Asia, where it could face intensive climate change and is thus a major conservation concern. We compiled dataset of 406 GPS-located occurrences based on field surveys, literature, the GBIF database. used Random Forest to build different species distribution models with maximum 27 explanatory variables, including climatic, topo...

Abstract Invasive predators, land clearing and altered fire regimes have been implicated in species decline extinction worldwide. Enhanced knowledge of how these factors interact influence medium-sized mammals is warranted. We tested three hypotheses using occupancy data for a diverse mammal assemblage including threatened species, five common two introduced mesopredators an apex predator easte...

Knowledge about the biogeography of organisms has long been a focus in ecological research, including the mechanisms that generate and maintain diversity. In this study, we targeted a microbial group relatively underrepresented in the microbial biogeographic literature, the soil Archaea. We surveyed the archaeal abundance and community composition using real-time quantitative PCR and T-RFLP app...

Little is known about the relationships between treeline elevation and climate at regional and local scales. It is compelling to fill this research gap with data from the Tibetan Plateau where some of the highest alpine treelines in the world are found. This research question partially results from the lack of in situ temperature data at treeline sites. Herein, treeline variables (e.g., elevati...