Eliot T. Miller

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: 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.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe similarities among metrics and null models across variance in phylogeny size and shape, species abundance, and species richness, and develop spatially explicit, individual-based simulations of neutral, competitive exclusion, or habitat filtering community assembly, and quantify the performance of all 278 metric and null model combinations against each assembly process.

TL;DR: This analysis provides a shortlist of the most distinctive trait–lineage combinations along with their geographic and climatic context: a global view of extant functional diversity across the tips of the vascular plant phylogeny.

TL;DR: A novel phylogenetic comparative method is developed to investigate how often and in which clades the macroevolutionary dynamics of the metabolic scaling have changed and whether traits such as ecto-/endothermy, genome size, and quadratic curvature with body mass could explain the observed pattern of shifts.