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The average kilometer of tropical rainforest is teeming with life; it contains thousands of species of plants and animals. As The Ornaments of Life reveals, many of the most colorful and eye-catching rainforest inhabitants—toucans, monkeys, leaf-nosed bats, and hummingbirds to name a few—are an important component of the infrastructure that supports life in the forest. These fruit-and-nectar eating birds and mammals pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of tropical plants, and unlike temperate communities, much of this greenery relies exclusively on animals for reproduction. Synthesizing recent research by ecologists and evolutionary biologists, Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress demonstrate the tremendous functional and evolutionary importance of these tropical pollinators and frugivores. They shed light on how these mutually symbiotic relationships evolved and lay out the current conservation status of these essential species. In order to illustrate the striking beauty of these \"ornaments\" of the rainforest, the authors have included a series of breathtaking color plates and full-color graphs and diagrams.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Current knowledge of patterns of biodiversity in the Wet Tropics Evolution and assembly of the Wet Tropics vertebrate fauna Late Quaternary climate fluctuations and extinction‐colonization dynamics Contemporary influences on biodiversity Summary Conservation of biodiversity in the Wet Tropics References

This chapter discusses the macroevolutionary consequences of interactions between plant-visiting tropical vertebrates and their food plants. It addresses the following questions: to what extent have tropical birds and mammals influenced rates of speciation and diversification in their food plants? Do plant clades that are pollinated or dispersed by tropical birds and mammals contain more species than sister clades that lack vertebrate pollination or dispersal? How do these mutualists influence speciation in their food plants and to what extent is coevolution involved in the speciation process? How have these interactions influenced speciation and diversification of tropical plant-visiting birds and mammals?

As the global urban population is poised to grow by 2.5 billion over the next 30 y, urban land conversions are expected to be an increasingly prominent driver of habitat and biodiversity loss. Mitigating these impacts urgently requires an improved understanding of where and how these biodiversity losses might occur. Here, we use a recently developed suite of land-use projections to provide an assessment of projected habitat that will be lost to urban land expansion for 30,393 species of terrestrial vertebrates from 2015 to 2050 across three shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios. We find that urban land expansion is a contributing driver of habitat loss (≥5% of total loss) for around one-third (26 to 39%) of the species assessed. For up to 855 species (2 to 3% of those assessed), urban land is a direct driver of species imperilment, driving at least one-quarter of a net habitat loss of 10% or more. Urban clusters with the greatest threats to species due to projected expansion are predominantly located in the developing tropical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Mesoamerica, and Southeast Asia. Our results suggest that strategies for minimizing the impacts of urban land could strengthen global biodiversity protection agreements. Collaborative, global action that focuses on vulnerable species and regions may represent an efficient strategy for avoiding the impacts forecast by our analysis.

Over the last 25 years, research on biodiversity has expanded dramatically, fuelled by increasing threats to the natural world. However, the number of published studies is heavily weighted towards certain taxa, perhaps influencing conservation awareness of and funding for less-popular groups. Few studies have systematically quantified these biases, although information on this topic is important for informing future research and conservation priorities. We investigated: i) which animal taxa are being studied; ii) if any taxonomic biases are the same in temperate and tropical regions; iii) whether the taxon studied is named in the title of papers on biodiversity, perhaps reflecting a perception of what biodiversity is; iv) the geographical distribution of biodiversity research, compared with the distribution of biodiversity and threatened species; and v) the geographical distribution of authors' countries of origin. To do this, we used the search engine Web of Science to systematically sample a subset of the published literature with 'biodiversity' in the title. In total 526 research papers were screened-5% of all papers in Web of Science with biodiversity in the title. For each paper, details on taxonomic group, title phrasing, number of citations, study location, and author locations were recorded. Compared to the proportions of described species, we identified a considerable taxonomic weighting towards vertebrates and an under-representation of invertebrates (particularly arachnids and insects) in the published literature. This discrepancy is more pronounced in highly cited papers, and in tropical regions, with only 43% of biodiversity research in the tropics including invertebrates. Furthermore, while papers on vertebrate taxa typically did not specify the taxonomic group in the title, the converse was true for invertebrate papers. Biodiversity research is also biased geographically: studies are more frequently carried out in developed countries with larger economies, and for a given level of species or threatened species, tropical countries were understudied relative to temperate countries. Finally, biodiversity research is disproportionately authored by researchers from wealthier countries, with studies less likely to be carried out by scientists in lower-GDP nations. Our results highlight the need for a more systematic and directed evaluation of biodiversity studies, perhaps informing more targeted research towards those areas and taxa most depauperate in research. Only by doing so can we ensure that biodiversity research yields results that are relevant and applicable to all regions and that the information necessary for the conservation of threatened species is available to conservation practitioners.

For decades, there has been enormous scientific interest in tropical savannahs and grasslands, fuelled by the recognition that they are a dynamic and potentially unstable biome, requiring periodic disturbance for their maintenance. However, that scientific interest has not translated into widespread appreciation of, and concern about threats to, their biodiversity. In terms of biodiversity, grassy biomes are considered poor cousins of the other dominant biome of the tropics—forests. Simple notions of grassy biomes being species-poor cannot be supported; for some key taxa, such as vascular plants, this may be valid, but for others it is not. Here, we use an analysis of existing data to demonstrate that high-rainfall tropical grassy biomes (TGBs) have vertebrate species richness comparable with that of forests, despite having lower plant diversity. The Neotropics stand out in terms of both overall vertebrate species richness and number of range-restricted vertebrate species in TGBs. Given high rates of land-cover conversion in Neotropical grassy biomes, they should be a high priority for conservation and greater inclusion in protected areas. Fire needs to be actively maintained in these systems, and in many cases re-introduced after decades of inappropriate fire exclusion. The relative intactness of TGBs in Africa and Australia make them the least vulnerable to biodiversity loss in the immediate future. We argue that, like forests, TGBs should be recognized as a critical—but increasingly threatened—store of global biodiversity. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Tropical grassy biomes: linking ecology, human use and conservation’.

Aim: The knowledge of biodiversity facets such as species composition, distribution and ecological niche is fundamental for the construction of biogeographic hypotheses and conservation strategies. However, the knowledge on these facets is affected by major shortfalls, which are even more pronounced in the tropics. This study aims to evaluate the effect of sampling bias and variation in collection effort on Linnean, Wallacean and Hutchinsonian shortfalls and diversity measures as species richness, endemism and beta-diversity. Location: Brazil. Methods: We have built a database with over 1.5 million records of arthropods, vertebrates and angiosperms of Brazil, based on specimens deposited in scientific collections and on the taxonomic literature. We used null models to test the collection bias regarding the proximity to access routes. We also tested the influence of sampling effort on diversity measures by regression models. To investigate the Wallacean shortfall, we modelled the geographic distribution of over 4000 species and compared their observed distribution with models. To quantify the Hutchinsonian shortfall, we used environmental Euclidean distance of the records to identify regions with poorly sampled environmental conditions. To estimate the Linnean shortfall, we measured the similarity of species composition between regions close to and far from access routes. Results: We demonstrated that despite the differences in sampling effort, the strong collection bias affects all taxonomic groups equally, generating a pattern of spatially biased sampling effort. This collection pattern contributes greatly to the biodiversity knowledge shortfalls, which directly affects the knowledge on the distribution patterns of diversity. Main conclusions: The knowledge on species richness, species composition and endemism in the Brazilian biodiversity is strongly biased spatially. Despite differences in sampling effort for each taxonomic group, roadside bias affected them equally. Species composition similarity decreased with the distance from access routes, suggesting collection surveys at sites far from roads could increase the probability of sampling new geographic records or new species.

Many biodiversity hotspots are located in montane regions, especially in the tropics. A possible explanation for this pattern is that the narrow thermal tolerances of tropical species and greater climatic stratification of tropical mountains create more opportunities for climate-associated parapatric or allopatric speciation in the tropics relative to the temperate zone. However, it is unclear whether a general relationship exists among latitude, climatic zonation and the ecology of speciation. Recent taxon-specific studies obtained different results regarding the role of climate in speciation in tropical versus temperate areas. Here, we quantify overlap in the climatic distributions of 93 pairs of sister species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles restricted to either the New World tropics or to the Northern temperate zone. We show that elevational ranges of tropical- and temperate-zone species do not differ from one another, yet the temperature range experienced by species in the temperate zone is greater than for those in the tropics. Moreover, tropical sister species tend to exhibit greater similarity in their climatic distributions than temperate sister species. This pattern suggests that evolutionary conservatism in the thermal niches of tropical taxa, coupled with the greater thermal zonation of tropical mountains, may result in increased opportunities for allopatric isolation, speciation and the accumulation of species in tropical montane regions. Our study exemplifies the power of combining phylogenetic and spatial datasets of global climatic variation to explore evolutionary (rather than purely ecological) explanations for the high biodiversity of tropical montane regions.

Gaps in digital accessible information (DAI) on species distributions hamper prospects of safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services, and addressing central ecological and evolutionary questions. Achieving international targets on biodiversity knowledge requires that information gaps be identified and actions prioritized. Integrating 157 million point records and distribution maps for 21,170 terrestrial vertebrate species, we find that outside a few well-sampled regions, DAI on point occurrences provides very limited and spatially biased inventories of species. Surprisingly, many large, emerging economies are even more under-represented in global DAI than species-rich, developing countries in the tropics. Multi-model inference reveals that completeness is mainly limited by distance to researchers, locally available research funding and participation in data-sharing networks, rather than transportation infrastructure, or size and funding of Western data contributors as often assumed. Our results highlight the urgent need for integrating non-Western data sources and intensifying cooperation to more effectively address societal biodiversity information needs. Comprehensive digital information on species distributions is crucial for research in ecology, evolution and conservation. Here, Meyer et al. find large gaps and biases in global vertebrate point records, especially in emerging economies, and identify key factors currently limiting information.