A guest post by Oskar Hagen (iDiv) | www.hagen.bio | @hagen_oskar What is the cause and what are the processes that gave rise to Earth’s biodiversity patterns through space and time? Much research has been devoted to describing these patterns, and over the years, the fields of macroecology and macroevolution have slowly transitioned from a mainly correlational…
It’s pouring rain over here at Baltimore while I’m on my way back from the Scaling Up workshop organized by ESA. We had a awesome time here thinking about questions, projects and collaborations on connecting community ecological data and processes with the macro scale. More impressions at #ESAScalingUP, and hopefully some updates about our progress…
For the last days, I was attending the 7th Annual Meeting of the Specialist Group on Macroecology of the Gesellschaft für Ökologie, organized by the group of Holger Kreft in Göttingen. It was a fun meeting, nice people as always, two very nice keynotes by Peter Linder and Jens-Christian Svenning, and my overall conclusion that…
Last year, I blogged about “Correlation and process in species distribution models: bridging a dichotomy”, a paper that we published in a recent special issue of the Journal of Biogeography. Broadly speaking, the paper discusses properties and issues around different approaches to modeling species distributions, with a focus on the extent to which those models…
In a new paper that will appear in Nature tomorrow, Walter Jetz and Colleagues “present, analyse and map the first complete dated phylogeny of all 9,993 extant species of birds, a widely studied group showing many unique adaptations.” The emphasis here is on the word “dated” – the study provides estimated diversification rates across the…
A new article coming up in Nature by David Storch and Petr Keil and Walter Jetz calculates continental scale SAR and EAR relationships for amphibians, birds and mammals. They find that, after correcting for mean range size of the taxa, there are nearly universal relationships across taxa and continents. While the SARs are clearly not…
Two papers that just appeared in press at Ecography caught my attention, a review about methods to deal with collinearity lead by Carsten Dormann (looks like the sequel to his autocorrelation paper in the same journal), and a “horizon scan” for macroecology by Jan Beck and colleagues. I guess the issue of collinearity is pretty…
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while – last autumn, Nathan Kraft and colleagues published a very interesting article in Science, in which they use two dataset on woody plant richness across an elevational and a latitudinal gradient to assess whether there is an effect of latitude and elevation on beta diversity.…
In a new study led by Carsten Dormann and Stanislaus Schymanski which I coauthored, we look at differences, but also at growing similarities between rather static/statistical/correlative and rather dynamic/process-based approaches to species distribution modeling. I think this is an interesting paper which touches upon a lot of issues that arise from the fact that classical…
A recent paper by P. Adler et al., “Productivity Is a Poor Predictor of Plant Species Richness” deals with the relationship between productivity and diversity. The authors examine an old and, not surprisingly, debated doctrine of ecology, which is that there is generally a hump-shaped relationship between productivity and diversity (as an example of such…
I’m lagging a little behind the news, but maybe it’s also an advantage to write about this issue after the first smoke has cleared. The topic is a paper by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell that appeared in Nature two weeks ago and that has sparked considerable controversy. Basically, the authors claim that “conventional” extinction…
theoretical ecology 