Microbial communities play a major role in disease, biogeochemical cycling, agriculture, and
bioremediation. However, identifying the ecological processes that govern microbial …

Aim More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have
assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the …

Biodiversity encompasses multiple attributes such as the richness and abundance of
species (taxonomic diversity), the presence of different evolutionary lineages (phylogenetic …

Identifying which ecological and life history traits influence a species' tolerance to
urbanization is critical to understanding the trajectory of biodiversity in an increasingly …

Early natural historians—Comte de Buffon, von Humboldt, and De Candolle—established
environment and geography as two principal axes determining the distribution of groups of …

1. Analysis of geographic patterns of extinction must be accompanied by knowledge of
biodiversity patterns. Such analysis is not yet available in insects given three shortfalls. First …

Understanding the processes that drive the dramatic changes in biodiversity along the
productivity gradient remains a major challenge. Insight from simple, bivariate relationships …

Host-associated microbiota composition can be conserved over evolutionary time scales.
Indeed, closely related species often host similar microbiota; ie, the composition of their …

Areas of endemism are important in biogeography because they capture facets of
biodiversity not represented elsewhere. However, the scales at which they are relevant to …

Parallel adaptation provides valuable insight into the predictability of evolutionary change
through replicated natural experiments. A steadily increasing number of studies have …