Migratory orientation of many animals is inheritable, enabling inexperienced (naïve) individuals to migrate independently using a geomagnetic or celestial compass. It remains unresolved how naïve migrants reliably reach remote destinations, sometimes …
The rise of the World Airline Network over the past century has led to sharp changes in our notions of “distance” and “closeness”—in terms of both trade and travel, but also (less desirably) with respect to the spread of disease. When novel pathogens …
COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory infectious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. It was first reported on in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China and within three months spread as a pandemic around the whole globe. Here, we study …
The mid-domain effect states that in a spatially bounded domain species richness tends to decrease from the center towards the boundary, thus producing a peak or plateau of species richness in the middle of the domain even in the absence of any …
Regular, long-distance migrations of thousands of animal species have consequences for the ecosystems that they visit, modifying trophic interactions and transporting many non-pathogenic and pathogenic organisms. The spatial structure and dynamic …
Understanding the mechanisms driving species biogeography and biodiversity remains a major challenge in phytoplankton ecology. Using a model of two phytoplankton species with a gleaner-opportunist trade-off and competing for light and a limiting …
Our ability to predict the identity of future invasive alien species is largely based upon knowledge of prior invasion history. Emerging alien species—those never before encountered as aliens—therefore pose a significant challenge to biosecurity interventions worldwide. Using a global database of the first regional records of alien species covering the years 1500–2005 we detected a surprisingly high proportion of species in recent records that have never been recorded as alien before. The high proportion of these emerging alien species mainly resulted from the increased accessibility of new source species pools in the native range. Risk assessment approaches that rely less on invasion history will need to be prioritized.
Biological invasions are a worldwide phenomenon, but the global flows between native and alien regions have rarely been investigated in a cross‐taxonomic study. We therefore lack a thorough understanding of the global patterns of alien species …
Habitat destruction, characterized by patch loss and fragmentation, is a major driving force of species extinction, and understanding its mechanisms has become a central issue in biodiversity conservation. Numerous studies have explored the effect of …
Habitat destruction, characterized by patch loss and fragmentation, is a key driver of biodiversity loss. There has been some progress in the theory of spatial food webs; however, to date, practically nothing is known about how patch configurational …