1 Department of Global Change Research, Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats (Universitat de les Illes Balears-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Esporles, Spain, 2 Department of Marine Resources and Ecology, Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats (Universitat de les Illes Balears-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Esporles, Spain, 3 Biological and Environmenta...

Modern climate change is producing poleward range shifts of numerous taxa, communities and ecosystems worldwide. The response of species to changing environments is likely to be determined largely by population responses at range margins. In contrast to the expanding edge, the low-latitude limit (rear edge) of species ranges remains understudied, and the critical importance of rear edge populat...

Human-induced climate change may threaten a large proportion of Earth's biota, but the uncertainties involved in projecting the future geographical distributions of species make quantitative predictions of extinction risk difficult to make. I discuss how insight from recent advances in macroecology and knowledge about species responses to past climate change can help predict extinction risks mo...

Environmental change is as multifaceted as are the species and communities that respond to these changes. Current theoretical approaches to modeling ecosystem response to environmental change often deal only with single environmental drivers or single species traits, simple ecological interactions, and/or steady states, leading to concern about how accurately these approaches will capture futur...

The environmental changes arising from nitrogen (N) deposition and precipitation influence soil ecological processes in forest ecosystems. However, the corresponding effects of environmental changes on soil biota are poorly known. Soil nematodes are the important bioindicator of soil environmental change, and their responses play a key role in the feedbacks of terrestrial ecosystems to climate ...

Prediction of biotic responses to future climate change in tropical Africa tends to be based on two modelling approaches: bioclimatic species envelope models and dynamic vegetation models. Another complementary but underused approach is to examine biotic responses to similar climatic changes in the past as evidenced in fossil and historical records. This paper reviews these records and highligh...

Large-scale habitat destruction and climate change result in the non-random loss of evolutionary lineages, reducing the amount of evolutionary history represented in ecological communities. Yet, we have limited understanding of the consequences of evolutionary history on the structure of food webs and the services provided by biological communities. Drawing on 11 years of data from a long-term ...

Extreme climatic events have a major role in the structuring of biological communities, and their occurrence is expected to increase due to climate change. Here I use a manipulative approach to test the effects of extreme storm events on rocky mid-shore assemblages. This study shows that an extreme storm can cause more negative effects than several mild storms, primarily by bringing the biologi...