Understanding the mechanisms controlling community diversity, functions, succession, and
biogeography is a central, but poorly understood, topic in ecology, particularly in microbial …

Global patterns of biodiversity are influenced by spatial and environmental variations in the
rate at which new species form. We relate variations in speciation rates to six key patterns of …

Species are fundamental units in biological research and can be defined on the basis of
various operational criteria. There has been growing use of molecular approaches for …

Whether most species are rare or have some intermediate abundance is a long-standing
question in ecology. Here, we use more than one billion observations from the Global …

A decade has now passed since Hubbell published The Unified Neutral Theory of
Biodiversity and Biogeography. Neutral theory highlights the importance of dispersal …

Estimating rates of speciation and extinction, and understanding how and why they vary
over evolutionary time, geographical space and species groups, is a key to understanding …

The “multispecies” coalescent (MSC) model that underlies many genomic species-
delimitation approaches is problematic because it does not distinguish between genetic …

Studies of phylogenetic diversification often show evidence for slowdowns in diversification
rates over the history of clades. Recent studies seeking biological explanations for this …

The mechanisms underlying the high extant biodiversity in the Neotropics have been
controversial since the 19th century. Support for the influence of period-specific changes on …

Evolution is happening all around us. In many cases–lately, due to technological advances
in molecular biology–scientists can now describe the evolutionary process in exquisite …