Adriano S. Melo

TL;DR: A better understanding of the relative roles of species sorting, mass effects and dispersal limitation in affecting aquatic metacommunities requires the following: characterising dispersal rates more directly or adopting better proxies than have been used previously; considering the nature of aquatic networks; and combining correlative and experimental approaches.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on variability in species composition among sampling units within a given area and present two conceptual models, which assume either (1) strong environmental control among localities (riffle sites in our case) within each region unit (a region unit encompasses a species pool and can be a stream or a basin or an ecoregion) or (2) that the spatial level of a region unit affects the relative importance of mechanisms affecting variability in localities within localities.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors employed spatial regression and tree regression to model the differences in altitude between areas in the Andes, Central America and western North America to find the highest diversity in birds and mammals.

TL;DR: The proportion of beta diversity attributed to nestedness was negatively correlated with cell age, and this effect was stronger for amphibians than mammals, and stronger for mammals than birds.

TL;DR: The hypotheses that beta diversity should increase with decreasing latitude and increase with spatial extent of a region have rarely been tested based on a comparative analysis of multiple datasets, and no such study has focused on stream insects.