Shai Meiri

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: The occurrence of Bergmann's rule in birds and mammals is reviewed, using only studies where statistical significance of the results was tested, to test whether sedentary birds conform to the rule more than migratory birds.

TL;DR: It is shown that additional conservation actions are needed to effectively protect reptiles, particularly lizards and turtles, and that adding reptile knowledge to a global complementarity conservation priority scheme identifies many locations that consequently become important.

TL;DR: The first assemblage-level global examination of 'Bergmann's rule' within an entire animal class suggests that global patterns of body size in avian assemblages are driven by interactions between the physiological demands of the environment, resource availability, species richness and taxonomic turnover among lineages.

TL;DR: There is no evidence for the existence of the island rule when phylogenetic comparative methods are applied to a large, high-quality dataset, and size evolution on islands is likely to be governed by the biotic and abiotic characteristics of different islands, the biology of the species in question and contingency.