Disentangling the strength and importance of barriers to reproduction that arise between diverging lineages is central to our understanding of species origin and maintenance. Evidence suggests that divergent adaptation can drive the development of ecologically and genetically based barriers to reproduction. To date, the vast majority of studies investigating the importance of different barriers to reproduction in plants have focused on short-lived temperate taxa while studies of reproductive isolation in trees and tropical taxa are...

1. Simultaneous reductions in herbivore abundance and increases in nitrogen deposition have led to radical shifts in plant communities worldwide. While the individual impacts of these human-caused disturbances are apparent, few studies manipulate both herbivory and N, nor differentiate among herbivore guilds, to understand contingencies in the ability of these drivers to affect producer diversity and productivity. As such, understanding how the main and combined effects of increasing soil N with declining herbivores may influence...

Bacteria and fungi secrete antibiotics to suppress and kill other microbes, but can these compounds be agents of competition against macroorganisms? We explore how one competitive tactic, antibiotic production, can structure the composition and function of brown food webs. This aspect of warfare between microbes and invertebrates is particularly important today as antibiotics are introduced into ecosystems via anthropogenic activities, but the ecological implications of these introductions are largely unknown. We hypothesized that antimicrobial compounds...

Species delimitation is a major quest in biology and is essential for adequate management of the organismal diversity. A challenging example comprises the fish species of red snappers in the Western Atlantic. Red snappers have been traditionally recognized as two separate species based on morphology: Lutjanus campechanus (northern red snapper) and L. purpureus (southern red snappers). Recent genetic studies using mitochondrial markers, however, failed to delineate these nominal species, leading to the current lumping of...

A primary goal of biogeography is to understand how large-scale environmental processes, like climate change, affect diversification. One often-invoked but seldom tested process is the so-called ''species-pump'' model, in which repeated bouts of co-speciation is driven by oscillating climate-induced habitat connectivity cycles. For example, over the past three million years, the landscape of the Philippine Islands has repeatedly coalesced and fragmented due to sea-level changes associated with the glacial cycles. This repeated climate-driven vicariance has...

Phylogenomic studies using genome‐wide datasets are quickly becoming the state of the art for systematics and comparative studies, but in many cases, they result in strongly supported incongruent results. The extent to which this conflict is real depends on different sources of error potentially affecting big datasets (assembly, stochastic, and systematic error). Here, we apply a recently developed methodology (GGI or gene genealogy interrogation) and data curation to new and published datasets with more than...

Functional diversity is increasingly recognized by microbial ecologists as the essential link between biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functioning, determining the trophic relationships and interactions between microorganisms, their participation in biogeochemical cycles and their responses to environmental changes. Consequently, its definition and quantification have practical and theoretical implications. In this opinion paper, we present a synthesis on the concept of microbial functional diversity from its definition to its application. Initially, we revisit to the original definition...