BES Macro

Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research
🧪 #Macroecology

PhD opportunity in Marine Macroecology 🌍

Global mangrove biodiversity: drivers, patterns, and resilience under climate change. Strong mentorship and support for a competitive FCT PhD fellowship application.

Send a brief CV: www.biodiversitydatascience.com/contact/

Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene The decrease in body size driven by the selective species turnover is widely altering fish food web topology and function.

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

Thousands of jute sticks float in the river, creating natural patterns in Bangladesh. Jute is soaked in water for 20-25 days to separate the jute fibre from the plant stem. The fibres are then sold for use in textiles such as yarn, sacks, carpets, and curtains – a vital part of Bangladesh’s economy.

Shifting baselines increase the risk of misinterpreting biodiversity trends Ecological studies quantifying the impact of land-use change on biodiversity may be sensitive to the choice of reference points – or baselines – particularly when sampling across human land-use gradi...

Space-for-time studies of land-use change rely on a baseline.
But what if that baseline has already changed?
In our new Ecography paper we show this can underestimate biodiversity loss. 🐦📉🧵(1/9)
nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Rapid and repeated evolution of pigmentation patterns in reef fishes - BMC Biology Background Pigmentation patterns are central to animal biology—shaping camouflage, signaling, and mate selection—and uncovering the mechanisms driving their diversification is key to understanding the...

Rapid and repeated evolution of pigmentation patterns in reef fishes

#ichthyology

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

BES Macro 2026 A British Ecological Society special interest group conference for researchers in macroecology and/or macroevolution at any academic career

Registration is open for #BESMacro2026 ! 15-17 July, in Reading, deadline of April 17 if you'd like to present!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bes-macro-...

A flyer for the next instalment of the Palaeoverse Lecture Series. The flyer features a cartoon laptop with a sticker of the Palaeoverse logo on the lid, alongside a picture of Natalie, wearing glasses and a white and green shirt.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨
🗓️26th February 2026, 15:00 UTC🗓️

Join us next week for our next instalment, given by Dr Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123.bsky.social from Natural History Museum, London, on “Hack-a-thons: what, why and how to run them” 💻

Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

Measuring the Quality of Species List Contents Abstract. Taxonomic lists, usually of species, have many functions. However, there is currently no reliable and convenient way to determine whether a list

📊 Thomas Pape et al. introduce a set of indicators to assess species list quality, a tool to improve biodiversity data and its use in research and conservation 🌍🧬 

👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios...

🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

Extreme events and river biodiversity under climate change Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Published online: 19 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s44358-026-00131-7Extreme events — such as floods, droughts and heatwaves — are escalating in frequency, magnitude and duration. This Review discusses the implications of these global changes for biodiversity in rivers, across population, community and ecosystem scales.

New online! Extreme events and river biodiversity under climate change

Fig. 1 Tree species coverage in the Global Wood Density Database (GWDD) v.2.

Beyond species means – the intraspecific contribution to global wood density variation

A #CommunityResource by Fischer et al.
👇

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#LatestIssue

BES Macro 2026 A British Ecological Society special interest group conference for researchers in macroecology and/or macroevolution at any academic career

Registration for BES Macro 2026 is now OPEN. This year will be 15-17 July, University of Reading, with a great series of plenaries/workshops lined up.

Register by April 17 if you'd like to present!

#BESMacro2026

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bes-macro-...

Shared and Divergent Processes Linked to Monocot Diversity Across the Mediterranean Climate Regions Aim The five Mediterranean regions of the globe are plant biodiversity hotspots, and there has not been a comparative analytical framework examining correlates of diversity across these regions. Of .....

Monocots. 🌴
Geophytes. 🪻
Mediterranean biome. 🔥
Phylogenetic diversity. 🤓
Check. It. Out. 🥳

(This project took 5+ years for various reasons. Science takes time sometimes and that’s ok!)

dx.doi.org/10.1111/geb....

Interested in how climate change will impact oxygen and CO₂ extremes in mangroves? Check out our new paper: doi.org/10.1029/2025...

The global island species–area relationship for plants | PNAS The island species−area relationship (ISAR) is known to be near-ubiquitous, but its properties across the fullest span of island areas globally and...

The global island species–area relationship for plants | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our latest effort to understand ISARs for plants globally!

Scientists can’t agree on where the world’s forests are A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that ...

What is a forest? Remarkably we don't have a consistent answer to that question,which is why we don't actually know how much forest there is on Earth or where it is. 🌏🧪🌲🌳

Temperature variation and life history mediate nonlinearity in fluctuations of marine fish populations worldwide - Nature Ecology & Evolution A global analysis of marine fish populations involving 243 recruitment and 266 spawner time series across 143 species finds that nonlinear dynamics are widespread and that the degree of nonlinearity i...

New in @natecoevo.nature.com, we show that nonlinear dynamics like oscillations & chaos occur in 81% of marine fish populations worldwide. Nonlinearity was correlated with the magnitude of fluctuations & amplified by temperature variation & in fast-lived species. 🌍🌐

Link: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

why do males defend territories in some species while pairs or family groups defend territories in others?

then-undergrad Shreyas Arashanapalli did a fantastic project to find out, analyzing 3177 playback experiments on 264 species

the best predictor?

latitude

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

👀 Global maps of 37 plant #FunctionalTraits as defined in the TRY Plant Trait Database with a resolution of 1 km and a global extent 🌐🧪 📏🧮🌮 global-traits.projects.earthengine.app/view/global-...

Climate, ecological dynamics, and the seasonal distribution of birds in mountains Ecological dynamics related to energy use and competition drives the seasonal distribution of birds in mountains across the world.

Why is there such variation in the birds encountered as you go up or down a mountain? New paper in #ScienceAdvances examines how climate and ecological interactions drive bird distributions in mountains throughout the year:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/10 ⬇️

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

What do we want?
Fossil databases! 🐚🦕
When do we want them?
Forever! 🗓️
Nice new paper highlighting how academic funding systems and digital architecture need to change, to ensure we can protect and sustain our precious fossil data 📚
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Critical Role of Coefficients: Updating Allometric Normalisation Constants for Modern Ecology and Modelling Allometry is central to a wide range of ecological research including dynamic food web modelling. Here we updated the often neglected allometric coefficients for metabolism and production, deriving n...

Important new paper from colleagues here @sheffielduni.bsky.social Biosciences, providing robust new estimates of normalisation constants for allometric relationships between body size, metabolism and production, at genus and metabolic group level onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

📖Published!

Ecological and evolutionary drivers of inflorescence diversity in Chinese angiosperms🌻🌼

🔎 Find out more: buff.ly/6wfXhKZ

Comparison of three temperate rainforest climate envelopes for Britain and Ireland: Where could our rainforest be? There are multiple methods for creating climate envelopes for temperate rainforest, and these climate envelopes result in different extents across Ireland and Britain. An awareness of these differenc...

How much temperate rainforest could there be in the UK and Ireland, and where? Despite campaigns calling for restoration in both countries, these questions have been difficult to answer. In our new paper we assess the evidence base 🌏🧪🌐🌳🌲 1/9

📢 Postdoc opening in avian biogeography & macroecology (Olomouc, CZ)
Vladimír Remeš (excellent scientist and mentor) is hiring a postdoc to study bird diversity across biomes, linking species pools, traits, climate & history using big data, fieldwork, and modelling.
🔗 pracuj.upol.cz/nc/zprava/cl...

A postdoc position in Biogeography and Macroecology is available at Palacky University, Czech Republic, with an application deadline of March 15, 2026. For details, contact prof. Vladimir Remes at vladimir.remes@upol.cz. More info: https://vladremes.github.io #postdoc

figure 2 from the linked paper, showing model performance in successfully predicting language ranges in North America

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification | Coelho et al. Proc B

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Happy to share my solo-authored Perspective "An Interpretation, Survey, and Outlook of Microbial Macroecology"! Making time these last few months to take stock of the patterns us microbial ecologists examine + models we invoke has been invaluable. Feedback welcome!

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Vegetation composition across savanna ecosystems and fire regimes.

Interesting perspective on the interaction of pyrodiversity and the biodiversity. One more case showing the importance of the creative destruction and abiotic (here more of a blurred interactive 'bio-abiotic') factors in keeping biotic structure.
www.nature.com/articles/s43...
🧪 ⚒️ #Macroecology

The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation - npj Biodiversity npj Biodiversity - The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation

New paper out:

The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation

with @fossildetective.bsky.social, @bigfacecats.bsky.social, Curtis Congreve & @jonhendricks.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44... 🦑⚒️