Given current threats to biodiversity, understanding the effects of diversity changes on the functions and services associated with intact ecosystems is of paramount importance. However, limited realism in most biodiversity studies makes it difficult to link the large and growing body of evidence for important functional consequences of biodiversity change to real-world losses of biodiversity. ...

Mass mortalities in natural populations, particularly those that leave few survivors over large spatial areas, may cause long-term ecological perturbations. Yet mass mortalities may remain undocumented or poorly described due to challenges in responding rapidly to unforeseen events, scarcity of baseline data, and difficulties in quantifying rare or patchily distributed species, especially in re...

We investigate the extent to which functional structure and spatial variability of intertidal communities coincide with major biogeographical boundaries, areas where extensive compositional changes in the biota are observed over a limited geographic extension. We then investigate whether spatial variation in the biomass of functional groups, over geographic (10's km) and local (10's m) scales, ...

Insular assemblages of species are often considered unique because they are exposed to unpredictable patterns of colonization/extinction that depend on distance from other sources of colonists and on size of islands. An alternative explanation is that islands provide fundamentally different habitats of those of the mainland, regardless of any possible effect of size and isolation. These alterna...

Environmental fluctuations can generate asynchronous species' fluctuations and community stability, due to compensatory dynamics of species with different environmental tolerances. We tested this hypothesis in intertidal hard-bottom communities of north-central Chile, where a persistent upwelling centre maintains a mosaic in sea surface temperatures (SST) over 10s of kilometres along the shore....

Marine riparian areas and coastal vegetation are essential important to the marine ecosystem, although their interactions functions still unknown ignored in ecological studies integrated management planning. In southeastern Brazil, allochthonous resources derived from Atlantic rainforests bordering rocky shores have been observed abundance together with shallow subtidal reef benthos. this study...