Alex L. Pigot

TL;DR: Using annual projections of temperature and precipitation across the ranges of more than 30,000 marine and terrestrial species to estimate when species will be exposed to potentially harmful climate conditions reveals that disruption of ecological assemblages as a result of climate change will be abrupt and could start as early as the current decade.

TL;DR: The results establish the minimum dimensionality required for avian functional traits to predict subtle variation in trophic niches and provide a global framework for exploring the origin, function and conservation of bird diversity.

TL;DR: It is shown that transition rates to sympatry increase with time since divergence and accelerate as the ecological differences between species accumulate, providing strong empirical evidence that biotic interactions limit species distributions across large spatial and temporal scales.

TL;DR: It is suggested that high species richness is mainly associated with a denser occupation of functional trait space, implying an increased specialization or overlap of ecological niches, and supporting the view that niche packing is the dominant trend underlying gradients of increasing biodiversity towards the lowland tropics.

TL;DR: The AVONET dataset as discussed by the authors contains comprehensive functional trait data for all birds, including six ecological variables, 11 continuous morphological traits, and information on range size and location, from 90,020 individuals of 11,009 extant bird species sampled from 181 countries.