Many studies show that species richness is correlated with climate, especially among local sites within a region. However, few studies have addressed how these climate– diversity relationships actually arise. Only a few processes can directly change species richness (i.e., speciation, extinction, dispersal), and these processes may be best studied by incorporating a phylogenetic perspective. He...

Received 07 May 2012 Accepted 12 December 2012 Abstract The well-documented re-colonisation of the French large river basins of Loire and Rhone by European otter and beaver allowed the analysis of explanatory factors and threats to species movement in the river corridor. To what extent anthropogenic disturbance of the riparian zone influences the corridor functioning is a central question in th...

We compare lizard assemblages of Cerrado and Amazonian savannas to test the ecological release hypothesis, which predicts that niche dimensions and abundance should be greater in species inhabiting isolated habitat patches with low species richness (Amazonian savannas and isolated Cerrado patches) when compared with nonisolated areas in central Cerrado with greater species richness. We calculat...

All species have ecophysiological requirements and tolerances, and both their local niche occupancy and their geographic distribution depend on the availability of suitable habitat (Gaston, 1990). Range sizes have been correlated with a number of variables, including niche breadth, local abundance, body size, growth form, pollination syndrome, and dispersal mode (Bock & Ricklefs, 1983; Brown, 1...

How the relative importance of community assembly processes varies with spatial scale is the focus of intensive debate, in part because inferring the scales at which specific niche-based processes act is difficult. One obstacle is that standard phylogenetic and functional diversity metrics may integrate the signals of multiple processes when combining separate niche axes into one variable (mult...

It remains a challenge to identify the geographical patterns and underlying environmental associations of species with unique ecological niches and distinct behaviors. This in turn hinders our understanding of the ecology as well as effective conservation management of threatened species. The white-eared night heron (Gorsachius magnificus) is a non-migratory nocturnal bird species that has a pa...

Pollinator decline has been linked to landscape change, through both habitat fragmentation and the loss of habitat suitable for the pollinators to live within. One method for exploring why landscape change should affect pollinator populations is to combine individual-level behavioural ecological techniques with larger-scale landscape ecology. A modelling framework is described that uses spatial...

Niche conservatism is the phenomenon in which species or other phylogenetic lineages seem to exhibit much the same ecological niche over their geographical ranges or over evolutionary time scales. Previous studies have suggested that optimal habitat selection can constrain niche evolution (and thus may help explain niche conservatism), in effect by preventing populations from experiencing unfav...