Why do areas with high numbers of small-range species occur where they do? We found that, for butterfly and plant species in Europe, and for bird species in the Western Hemisphere, such areas coincide with regions that have rare climates, and are higher and colder areas than surrounding regions. Species with small range sizes also tend to occur in climatically diverse regions, where species are...

Climate change has a great impact on the species distribution range and many endangered plant species. Fritillaria imperialis as a species that is native to Central Zagros, Iran is a medicinal plant with great ecological and commercial profits. Its population has decreased considerably and the species would be endangered in later decades. Understanding the habitat needs of this species, evaluat...

Although often not collected specifically for the purposes of conservation, herbarium specimens offer sufficient information to reconstruct parameters that are needed designate a species as ‘at-risk’ extinction. While such designations should prompt quick and efficient legal action towards recovery, lags far behind is mired in bureaucratic procedure. The increase online digitization natural his...

For many years, the megafaunal extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene have been assumed to have affected only those species that became extinct. However, recent analyses show that the surviving species may also have experienced losses in terms of genetic and ecological diversity.

Explaining patterns of diversity has long been a central focus in ecology. One of the most challenging problems has been to understand how species occupying similar ecological niches can co-exist because, with limited resources, demographic stochasticity is expected to lead to the eventual extinction of all but one of them. The Allee effect has been widely studied for its impact on the extincti...

A metapopulation is a spatially structured population that persists over time as a set of local populations in balance between local extinction and colonization. Starting in 1969, and accelerating since the early 1990s, mathematical models of metapopulations have shown the importance of landscape connectivity and dispersal for persistence of a species or of interacting species. Some metapopulat...

The architectural complexity of flower structures (hereafter referred to as floral complexity) may be linked to pollination by specialized pollinators that can increase the probability of successful seed set. As plant-pollinator systems become fragile, a loss of such specialized pollinators could presumably result in an increased likelihood of pollination failure. This is an issue likely to be ...