Acceleration of human activities over the past century might have caused a corresponding acceleration in the decline of abundance of species, but this has not been empirically assessed. Further, the temporal dynamics of abundance arises from a complex interaction between recruitment and loss of individuals, yet this interplay remains unexplored across large spatial scales. We address these gaps by examining temporal changes, acceleration, deceleration, and vital processes (i.e. recruitment and loss) across much of the North American avifauna from 1987 to 2021. We confirm the continent-wide decline of bird abundance, and pinpoint the regional hotspots of acceleration of this decline in the Mid-Atlantic region, Midwest, and California, matching broad spatial patterns of human activities. We further reveal that the increasing rate of loss is the primary process of acceleration of abundance decline in California and the Midwest, whereas a decrease in recruitment rate dominates in the Mid-Atlantic. Finally, we highlight a worrisome trend: 96% of bird species and 100% of families with increasing abundances are concurrently experiencing a decline in recruitment rate. Thus, we need conservation policies even for species that appear to be thriving. Simply preventing loss may not be enough, as we also need policies that enhance recruitment.

Human activities have altered the species composition of assemblages through introductions and extinctions, but it remains unclear how those changes can affect the different facets of biodiversity. Here we assessed the impact of changes in species composition on taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity across 281 bird assemblages worldwide. To provide a more nuanced understanding of functional diversity, we distinguished morphological from life-history traits. We showed that shifts in species composition could trigger a global decline in avian biodiversity due to the high number of potential extinctions. Moreover, these extinctions were not random but unique in terms of function and phylogeny at the regional level. Our findings demonstrated that non-native species cannot compensate for these losses, as they are both morphologically and phylogenetically close to the native fauna. In the context of the ongoing biodiversity crisis, such alterations in the functional and phylogenetic structure of bird assemblages could heighten ecosystem vulnerability.

Stored seeds of wild plant species serve as repositories of plant genetic diversity, and are valuable resources for evolutionary research, species conservation, and ecosystem restoration. However, long-term storage inevitably leads to the deterioration and loss of viability of the seed. While seed longevity is known to be species-specific, the significance of intraspecific variability in seed longevity, and how it varies across geographic ranges, remains unexplored. Here, we tested how seed longevity varies between and within species, and how it correlates with the climate in the source region. We focused on 42 common grassland species and 182 accessions from 23 regions across Europe. To simulate seed aging in storage, we exposed the seeds to artificial ageing conditions (60% relative humidity, temperature 45°C). The seed longevity strongly varied between species more than twenty-fold, increased with seed protein content, yet it did not depend on phylogeny. Within species, the seed longevity varied more than ten-fold between the accessions. It increased with the initial seed viability and mean annual temperature in the region of origin. Our results suggest that seed from warmer regions, especially those with high initial viability, survive longer in conservation seed banks.

In the face of increasing biodiversity threats, understanding the predictors of plant extinction risk is critical for conservation. Global assessments indicate over one-third of terrestrial plant species are rare, with regional extinctions outpacing documented global extinctions. Integrating national and regional Red Lists of vascular plants with plant trait data and phylogenies, we analyze patterns of regional plant extinctions globally, to discern the role of evolutionary and functional uniqueness in species' vulnerability. Specifically, we investigate whether phylogenetic marginality—species' evolutionary distinctiveness—correlates with their risk of regional and global extinction of vascular plants. Additionally, we examine if species that have gone extinct exhibit greater functional trait marginality, meaning they occupy more unique positions in the functional trait space compared to the broader species pool. This approach may prompt early conservation actions across countries, even before species are globally recognized as threatened, addressing the growing importance of extinction risk estimation for enhancing conservation initiatives amid escalating anthropogenic impact.

Endangered forest species often depend on slowly evolving structures of old-growth forests such as large-diameter trees and deadwood, or cautious or absent forest management. Small-scale private forests are particularly important in this regard, offering great structural diversity and varied landscapes shaped by the individual owners, and serve as refuges for forest biodiversity.

The Parcel Index of Conservation Attributes (PICA) is presented as a tool to quantify the value of individual small-scale private forest parcels in terms of crucial old-growth structures that are becoming rare in current forests. PICA values are defined by broadleaf tree volume, broadleaf deadwood, management intensity, biotope values (according to German federal law), and number of large-diameter trees.

The PICA components have been demonstrated to correlate with easily obtainable topographical data such as land use, plot geometry, and forest cover continuity. To aid nature conservation efforts in understanding the spatial distribution of valuable structures, we utilized machine learning algorithms to predict PICA values. We parameterized and evaluated different models using data collected from a field survey of 129 small-scale private forest parcels in the Lower Saxon Hills region. The models were then used to create a map of potential old-growth biodiversity hotspots.

Humans pose threats to numerous native species, while they also have introduced many species outside their native ranges, where some have become naturalized or even invasive. Most of the naturalized species are common at home, but some of them may actually be threatened. Naturalization of threatened species could be considered an accidental kind of ex-situ conservation, but with the potential to become invasive pose a conservation conflict. It remains, however, unknown how many threatened-but-naturalized species there are, what features they have, and in which regions they are native and naturalized. To address this, we combined databases on the global threat status and naturalization success of the world’s seed plants. We found that 231 threatened species have become naturalized elsewhere; most of them are trees or shrubs with economic uses such as provisioning of materials and landscaping. Europe received more threatened-but-naturalized species than expected, whereas Africa, which harbours the largest number, was under-represented. Australasia and Northern America were over-represented as donors of threatened species. Our study shows that some threatened plant species have managed to become naturalized outside their native range, although the number is relatively low. Future studies should test the potential conservation value of these naturalized populations.

Human induced climate change poses a threat to global biodiversity. Broad scale effects of climate change are often assessed on the basis of long-term changes in climatic conditions. However, the effect of increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (EWE) due to climate change on biodiversity remains unclear. We introduce a general framework to investigate the effects of EWE on species. As a case study we train classical presence/absence models for 132 German bird species of conservation interest (species requiring assessment under the EU Bird Protection Areas guidelines) with monthly specific weather and remote sensing data over the time period of 1999 to 2022. The species-specific models predict the suitability through time from 1999 to 2022 for each month across Germany. With this approach, the suitability over all non-extreme months can be compared to the suitability in months with climatic extremes, to generate a measure of the impact of an extreme event on the distribution of a species. With this measure it is possible to identify geographic areas, species communities, taxonomic- and functional groups that may be vulnerable towards specific EWE.

New advances and technologies are leading to an unprecedented high resolution of community data, perhaps making it possible for the first time to unravel the mechanisms of metacommunity assembly. Environmental filtering, species interactions, ecological drift, and dispersal determine community composition in local communities, but disentangling their relative importance has proven elusive, likely due to inappropriate tools. Here, we show that joint species distribution models (JSDM) and variance partitioning can provide a solution. First, JSDM reveals the "internal structure" of communities and species that can be correlated in a second step against environmental and spatial distinctiveness, thereby revealing the importance of metacommunity assembly mechanisms. We demonstrate that this approach can detect environmental filtering and dispersal limitation in a pond metacommunity. We conclude that JSDMs are a powerful tool for metacommunity analysis, especially for large community data.

The Global Inventory of Floras and Traits (GIFT) is a global database of regional plant checklists that has proven successful in documenting biogeographical patterns of plants. Since the release of the first version of GIFT, the database kept on expanding. GIFT version 3.0 contains 5169 plant checklists referring to 3400 regions worldwide. These checklists include a total of 371,148 land plant species, mostly vascular plants, of which 354,848 have accepted species names, and species-level data for 109 functional traits.

This presentation will first introduce the GIFT database and present its structure with examples showing how to retrieve distribution data for specific taxonomic groups, functional traits at the species level, phylogenetic diversity, and environmental data at the regional level. Second, a comparison of data between the GIFT database and the GBIF repository will be presented.

Species distribution modeling (SDM) often performs poorly when evaluated against spatially independent test data. One contributing factor to this issue is the neglect of spatial autocorrelation during model training and validation, resulting in inflated performance metrics and the development of overly complex models. Among the SDM softwares used Maxent is one of the most widely utilized methods, largely attributable to its user-friendly graphical-user-interface (GUI). It has been shown that parameter tuning leads to better Maxent models in terms of complexity and performance. However, in nearly all published applications, Maxent is used with the default settings. The lack of model tuning and the ignoring of spatial autocorrelation may be related to the fact that the Maxent GUI does not include such functionalities.

We implemented tuning and validation functionalities that account for spatial autocorrelation in a software extension for Maxent: spatialMaxent (https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10635). We compared our results to models based on Maxent's default settings on a dataset with over 200 species. spatialMaxent outperformed the Maxent models in terms of model complexity and performance on spatially independent test data. All tuning functionalities in spatialMaxent are accessible via the user-friendly GUI, ensuring easy access for researchers and conservation practitioners alike.

Understanding the mechanisms shaping species distributions is crucial for deciphering biodiversity patterns. While correlative models like ecological niche models (ENM) and species distribution models (SDM) have been valuable in predicting potential distributions across various scales, process-explicit models offer a more nuanced understanding of distribution causes, abundance predictions, and dispersal dynamics. These models vary in algorithmic nature and input data requirements. I will discuss the distinctions between correlative and process-explicit models, illustrating with a case study on the invasive ambrosia beetle Xyleborus glabratus, a vector of Raffaelea lauricola causing laurel wilt disease in the southeastern USA. Facing challenges due to lack of demographic data, we developed a process-explicit model in the lab. Our simulations align spatio-temporally with known invasion dynamics and provide superior dispersal estimates compared to correlative approaches. Predictions highlight Mexico's favorable conditions for beetle establishment, particularly in the central west. These findings have implications for agricultural, forestry, and economic decision-making, emphasizing the value of multidisciplinary approaches. I will discuss process-explicit model advantages and limitations, encouraging further exploration in diverse research contexts.

The extraordinary species richness and endemism of the Indo-Australian Archipelago exists in one of the most geologically dynamic regions of the planet. Application of the biogeographic history and developed processes-based approaches has stimulated an increasing biogeographic work for aboveground animals and plants in this region. But it is basically unknown how the degree of biogeographic isolation may lead to differences in belowground biodiversity. Here, we used geographic distance and beta diversity partitioning to analyze the influence of biogeographic isolation on soil oribatid mite assemblages in eleven regions in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. On average, oribatid mite richness in the eleven regions showed pronounced endemism. The soil oribatid mites’ zoogeographic distribution pattern changed gradually from the west and east sides to the central regions, consisted with the combination of Weber’s line, Lydekker’s line and Holt’s line. That dissimilarity pattern, in which species turnover was the most critical driving process, was closely correlated with geographic distance, underlining the importance of biogeographic isolation in soil animal biogeography. Our results, for the first time, elucidate the processes-based soil biodiversity patterns in the Indo-Australian Archipelago and emphasize how long-lasting vicariance structure divergent diversity in this biodiversity hotspot region.

Environmental filtering processes are revealed by trait variation in communities, with the community-weighted mean (CWM) being a common metric to indicate optimal adaptive strategy of taxa and directionality of filtering processes. Proximity to CWM indicates of higher fitness, and deviations from this optimal value result in changes in relative abundances of coexisting species. We investigated patterns of intraspecific trait variation in four coexisting carrion beetle (Silphidae) species across elevational gradients in temperate forest ecosystems with distinct natural vegetation zones ranging from 950 m to 1700 m a.s.l.. For seven of the 12 traits, most of the variation was attributed to intraspecific variation. Niche breadth was positively correlated with relative species abundance for most traits. In addition, CWMs of traits associated with long-distance dispersal decreased with elevation, while those associated with microhabitat use showed opposite trends. Soil temperature influenced tibia length after controlling for species identity effects. Nicrophorus quadripunctatus and N. tenuipes supported the CWM-optimality hypothesis for body width and thorax width, while N. maculifrons and N. vespilloides showed an opposite pattern for body width and thorax length. Our study suggests that some functional traits are highly variable, which is likely to help carrion beetles adapt across elevations and vegetation types.