The old adage than “an ecosystem is more than the sum of its parts” is well illustrated by plant-pollinator mutualisms. Pollination is a vital ecosystem process that mostly goes unnoticed, typically involving small animals that transfer pollen from flower to flower as they sip nectar or gather pollen.
The determination of best climatic predictors of whole-organismal performance is essential to improve current and forecast impacts of climate change on organisms. Most of the emphasis on global climate change and its effects on organismal performance concerns mean temperature conditions despite known changes in other climatic variables such as precipitation, cloud cover and temperature variability.
Protected areas are a crucial part of global biodiversity conservation strategies. However, the ecological integrity of most protected areas is currently under threat from biological invasions which are a major direct driver of biodiversity loss, changes in ecosystem services and biotic homogenization.
Because of the numerous threats posed by invasive species to natural ecosystems, a major goal of invasion biology is to understand the factors explaining the distribution of species worldwide. Despite the many efforts at local and regional scales to predict areas vulnerable to invasion, the relative roles of biotic and abiotic conditions on the global distribution of species are still rather poorly understood.
The influence of human activities on biodiversity is extensive and worldwide. In fact, there may not be any untouched region as the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and occurrences of biological invasions are ubiquitous across biomes.
