Ricerc@Sapienza

Aim: To evaluate how environment and evolutionary history interact to influence global patterns of mammal trait diversity (a combination of 14 morphological and life-history traits). Location: The global terrestrial environment. Taxon: Terrestrial mammals. Methods: We calculated patterns of spatial turnover for mammalian traits and phylogenetic lineages using the mean nearest taxon distance. We then used a variance partitioning approach to establish the relative contribution of trait conservatism, ecological adaptation and clade specific ecological preferences on global trait turnover.

Phylogenetic turnover quantifies the evolutionary distance among species assemblages and is central to understanding the main drivers shaping biodiversity. It is affected both by geographic and environmental distance between sites. Therefore, analyzing phylogenetic turnover in environmental space requires removing the effect of geographic distance. Here, we apply a novel approach by deciphering phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods in environmental space after removing geographic land distance effects.

Nations have committed to ambitious conservation targets in response to accelerating rates of global biodiversity loss. Anticipating future impacts is essential to inform policy decisions for achieving these targets, but predictions need to be of sufficiently high spatial resolution to forecast the local effects of global change. As part of the intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, we present a fine-resolution assessment of trends in the persistence of global plant biodiversity.

Community structure as summarized by presence–absence data is often evaluated via diversity measures by incorporating taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional information on the constituting species. Most commonly, various dissimilarity coefficients are used to express these aspects simultaneously such that the results are not comparable due to the lack of common conceptual basis behind index definitions.

An enormous number of measures based on different criteria have been proposed to quantify evenness or unevenness among species relative abundances in an assemblage. However, a unified approach that can encompass most of the widely used indices is still lacking. Here, we first present some basic requirements for an evenness measure.