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Although many taxa show a latitudinal gradient in richness, the relationship between latitude and species richness is often asymmetrical between the northern and southern hemispheres. Here we examine the latitudinal pattern of species richness across 1003 local ant assemblages. We find latitudinal asymmetry, with southern hemisphere sites being more diverse than northern hemisphere sites. Most of this asymmetry could be explained statistically by differences in contemporary climate. Local ant species richness was positively associated with temperature, but negatively (although weakly) associated with temperature range and precipitation. After contemporary climate was accounted for, a modest difference in diversity between hemispheres persisted, suggesting that factors other than contemporary climate contributed to the hemispherical asymmetry. The most parsimonious explanation for this remaining asymmetry is that greater climate change since the Eocene in the northern than in the southern hemisphere has led to more extinctions in the northern hemisphere with consequent effects on local ant species richness.

Abstract. We present a framework to measure the strength of environmental filtering and disequilibrium of the species composition of a local community across time, relative to past, current, and future climates. We demonstrate the framework by measuring the impact of climate change on New World forests, integrating data for climate niches of more than 14 000 species, community composition of 471 New World forest plots, and observed climate across the most recent glacial-interglacial interval. We show that a majority of communities have species compositions that are strongly filtered and are more in equilibrium with current climate than random samples from the regional pool. Variation in the level of current community disequilibrium can be predicted from Last Glacial Maximum climate and will increase with near-future climate change.

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Patterns of ant species diversity are well documented and yet the mechanisms promoting species coexistence among communities are often elusive. Two emerging hypotheses that account for coexistence in ant communities are the discovery-dominance tradeoff and the dominance-thermal tolerance tradeoff. Here we used behavioural assays and community-level sampling from ant assemblages in the southern Appalachians, USA to test for the discovery-dominance and dominance-thermal tolerance tradeoffs. Species that were behaviorally dominant during interspecific interactions tended to forage in a narrow window of generally warmer temperatures, whereas subordinate species tended to forage in a wide range of temperatures, including colder temperatures. Species that foraged at lower temperature tended to be behaviourally subordinate, suggesting that a dominance-thermal tolerance tradeoff promotes coexistence in this system. Species richness was positively related to site average annual temperature and within-site variation in ground temperature, suggesting that temperature also shapes the structure of ant communities and regulates diversity. There was no relationship between the ability of a species to discover food resources and its behavioural dominance, contrary to the predictions of the discovery-dominance tradeoff hypothesis. In sum, our results show that temperature plays numerous roles in promoting regional coexistence in this system.

Aim To use a fine-grained global model of ant diversity to identify the limits of our knowledge of diversity in the context of climate change.Location Global.Methods We applied generalized linear modelling to a global database of local ant assemblages to predict the species density of ants globally. Predictors evaluated included simple climate variables, combined temperature · precipitation variables, biogeographic region, elevation, and interactions between select variables. Areas of the planet identified as beyond the reliable prediction ability of the model were those having climatic conditions more extreme than what was represented in the ant database.Results Temperature was the most important single predictor of ant species density, and a mix of climatic variables, biogeographic region and interactions between climate and region yielded the best overall model. Broadly, geographic patterns of ant diversity match those of other taxa, with high species density in the wet tropics and in some, but not all, parts of the dry tropics. Uncertainty in model predictions appears to derive from the low amount of standardized sampling of ants in Asia, in Africa and in the most extreme (e.g. hottest) climates. Model residuals increase as a function of temperature. This suggests that our understanding of the drivers of ant diversity at high temperatures is incomplete, especially in hot and arid climates. In other words, our ignorance of how ant diversity relates to environment is greatest in those regions where most species occur -hot climates, both wet and dry.Main conclusions Our results have two important implications. First, temperature is necessary, but not sufficient, to explain fully the patterns of ant diversity. Second, our ability to predict ant diversity is weakest exactly where we need to know the most, the warmest regions of a warming world. This includes significant parts of the tropics and some of the most biologically diverse areas in the world.

Xylose was dehydrated over (H ? ) mordenite, using a continuous two-liquid-phase (aqueous-toluene) plug-flow reactor at 260°C and 55 atm, with 98% conversion rate, 98% furfural molar yield, and 98% furfural selectivity (results from the first pass). Furfural in toluene was hydrogenated over a Cu/Fe catalyst, at 252°C (gasphase), in a 99% conversion rate to give 2-methylfuran in a 98% yield (same activity maintained for a 20-h operation).

. The electrocatalytic hydrogenation (ECH) of phenanthrene, anthracene, and naphthalene has been investigated under constant current at Raney nickel electrodes in a mixed aqueous organic medium. The influence of various parameters on the efficiency of the process determined by the current efficiency (a measure of the competition between hydrogenation and hydrogen evolution, the only two electrochemical processes occumng), the extent of hydrogenation (yield of octahydro-derivatives), and the conversion rate was studied with phenanthrene. The best conditions were ethylene glycol or propylene glycol as cosolvent containing between 1.5 to 5% of water, a neutral or slightly acidic medium containing boric acid (0.1 M) as buffer (initial pH of 2.6, final pH of 6.0-6.2), sodium chloride or tetrabutylamonium chloride as supporting electrolyte, a temperature of 80°C, and a current density of 42 to 84 m~/ c r n~. The most active electrodes (consisting of Raney Ni particles dispersed in a nickel matrix and surrounded by a layer of porous nickel) were obtained by leaching the dispersed alloy particles at 75°C for 7 h in 30% aqueous sodium hydroxide. The electrohydrogenation stopped at derivatives with a single aromatic ring, namely the octahydrophenanthrenes, octahydroanthracenes, and tetralin. In a non-buffered medium, tetrahydrophenanthrene could be obtained with selectivities of 80% or better.