Dominic J. Bennett

TL;DR: A terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage is analysed to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes and shows that in the worst-affected habitats, pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%.

TL;DR: A new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world is described and assessed.

TL;DR: It is found that OTU richness shows a declining west-to-east diversity gradient that is in agreement with the species richness patterns documented here and previously for birds and trees, suggesting that most taxonomic groups respond to the same overall diversity gradients at large spatial scales.

TL;DR: The PREDICTS project as discussed by the authors provides a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use.

TL;DR: This work uses the method, “phyl ofactorization,” to re-analyze datasets from the human body and soil microbial communities, demonstrating how phylofactorization is a dimensionality-reducing tool, an ordination-visualization tool, and an inferential tool for identifying edges in the phylogeny along which putative functional ecological traits may have arisen.