SummaryForest edges influence more than half the world’s forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. We assembled an unmatched global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a new statistical approach for quantifying edge impacts in heterogeneous landscapes to quantify edge-determined changes in abundance of 1673 vertebrate species. We show that 85% of species’ abundances are affected, either positively or negatively, by forest edges. Forest core species, which were more likely to be listed as threatened by the IUCN, only reached peak abundances at sites farther than 200-400 m from sharp high-contrast forest edges. Smaller-bodied amphibians, larger reptiles and medium-sized non-volant mammals experienced a larger reduction in suitable habitat than other forest core species. Our results highlight the pervasive ability of forest edges to restructure ecological communities on a global scale.

Body size is intrinsically linked to metabolic rate and life-history traits, and is a crucial determinant of food webs and community dynamics. The increased temperatures associated with the urban-heat-island effect result in increased metabolic costs and are expected to drive shifts to smaller body sizes . Urban environments are, however, also characterized by substantial habitat fragmentation , which favours mobile species. Here, using a replicated, spatially nested sampling design across ten animal taxonomic groups, we show that urban communities generally consist of smaller species. In addition, although we show urban warming for three habitat types and associated reduced community-weighted mean body sizes for four taxa, three taxa display a shift to larger species along the urbanization gradients. Our results show that the general trend towards smaller-sized species is overruled by filtering for larger species when there is positive covariation between size and dispersal, a process that can mitigate the low connectivity of ecological resources in urban settings . We thus demonstrate that the urban-heat-island effect and urban habitat fragmentation are associated with contrasting community-level shifts in body size that critically depend on the association between body size and dispersal. Because body size determines the structure and dynamics of ecological networks , such shifts may affect urban ecosystem function.

There is growing evidence from both experimental and non-experimental studies that fluctuating asymmetry does not consistently index stress or fitness. The widely held--yet poorly substantiated--belief that fluctuating asymmetry can act as a universal measure of developmental stability and predictor of stress-mediated changes in fitness, therefore staggers. Yet attempts to understand why the reported relationships between fluctuating asymmetry, stress and fitness are so heterogeneous--i.e. whether the associations are truly weak or non-existent or whether they become confounded during different stages of the analytical pathways remain surprisingly scarce. Hence, we attempt to disentangle these causes, by reviewing the various statistical and conceptual factors that are suspected to confound potential relationships between fluctuating asymmetry, stress and fitness. Two main categories of factors are discerned: those associated with the estimation of developmental stability through fluctuating asymmetry and those associated with the effects of genotype and environment on developmental stability. Next, we describe a series of statistical tools that have recently been developed to help reduce this noise. We argue that the current lack of a theoretical framework that predicts if and when relationships with developmental stability can be expected, urges for further theoretical and empirical research, such as on the genetic architecture of developmental stability in stressed populations. If the underlying developmental mechanisms are better understood, statistical patterns of asymmetry variation may become a biologically meaningful tool.

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What factors determine the persistence of species in fragmented habitats? To address this question, we studied the relative impacts of forest deterioration and fragmentation on bird species in 12 rainforest fragments in Kenya, combining 6 years of individual capture-recapture data with measurements of current captures and museum specimens. Species mobility, as estimated from species-specific dispersal rates, and tolerance to habitat deterioration, as estimated from change in fluctuating asymmetry with increasing habitat disturbance, explained 88% of the variation in patch occupancy among eight forest bird species. Occupancy increased with mobility and with tolerance to deterioration, where both variables contributed equally to this relationship. We conclude that individual-level study, such as of dispersal behavior and phenotypic development, can predict patterns of persistence at the species level. More generally, for conservation tactics to stand a high chance of success, they should include action both within sites, to minimize habitat deterioration, and across landscapes, to maximize dispersal.

Evolutionary studies typically focus on adaptations to particular environmental conditions, thereby often ignoring the role of possible constraints. Here we focus on the case of variation in dorsal wing melanization in a satyrine butterfly Pararge aegeria. Because melanin is a complex polymer, its synthesis may be constrained if ambient conditions limit the resource budget. This hypothesis was tested by comparing melanization among butterflies that fed as larvae on host grasses experiencing different drought-stress treatments. Treatment differences were validated both at the level of the host plant (nitrogen, carbonate, and water content) and of the butterfly (life-history traits: survival, development time, and size at maturity). Melanization rate was measured as average gray value of the basal dorsal wing area. This area, close to the thorax, is known to be functionally significant for basking in order to thermoregulate. Individuals reared on drought-stressed host plants developed paler wings, and development of darker individuals was slower and less stable as estimated by their level of fluctuating asymmetry. These results provide evidence that melanin is indeed costly to synthesize, and that differences in environmental quality can induce phenotypic variation in wing melanization. Therefore, studies dealing with spatial and/or temporal patterns of variation in wing melanization should not focus on adaptive explanations alone, but rather on a cost-benefit balance under particular sets of environmental conditions.

Aerial dispersal by ballooning is a passive flight, by which wind drag generates an upward lift on a silk thread. It is likely to reflect an aerial lottery, in which the absence of flight direction control is a serious cost for long-distance dispersal in a fragmented landscape. For species occurring in one patchily distributed habitat type, dispersal should evolve in a different way from morphological traits, directly linked to active dispersal. Therefore, we expect that if the risk of landing in an unsuitable habitat is lower than the probability of reaching a suitable habitat, selection should benefit a well-developed ballooning behaviour. We investigated interspecific variation in the ballooning-initiating tiptoe behaviour as it is linked to spider dispersal performance. Our results indeed indicate that ballooning performance is negatively related to habitat specialization in spiders from patchy grey dunes, so habitat specialists are characterized by poorly developed dispersal behaviour. These findings are concordant with recent insights that dispersal is selected as risk spreading in generalists, while it is selected against in specialist species.

The increasing urbanization process is hypothesized to drastically alter (semi‐)natural environments with a concomitant major decline in species abundance and diversity. Yet, studies on this effect of urbanization, and the spatial scale at which it acts, are at present inconclusive due to the large heterogeneity in taxonomic groups and spatial scales at which this relationship has been investigated among studies. Comprehensive studies analysing this relationship across multiple animal groups and at multiple spatial scales are rare, hampering the assessment of how biodiversity generally responds to urbanization. We studied aquatic (cladocerans), limno‐terrestrial (bdelloid rotifers) and terrestrial (butterflies, ground beetles, ground‐ and web spiders, macro‐moths, orthopterans and snails) invertebrate groups using a hierarchical spatial design, wherein three local‐scale (200 m × 200 m) urbanization levels were repeatedly sampled across three landscape‐scale (3 km × 3 km) urbanization levels. We tested for local and landscape urbanization effects on abundance and species richness of each group, whereby total richness was partitioned into the average richness of local communities and the richness due to variation among local communities. Abundances of the terrestrial active dispersers declined in response to local urbanization, with reductions up to 85% for butterflies, while passive dispersers did not show any clear trend. Species richness also declined with increasing levels of urbanization, but responses were highly heterogeneous among the different groups with respect to the richness component and the spatial scale at which urbanization impacts richness. Depending on the group, species richness declined due to biotic homogenization and/or local species loss. This resulted in an overall decrease in total richness across groups in urban areas. These results provide strong support to the general negative impact of urbanization on abundance and species richness within habitat patches and highlight the importance of considering multiple spatial scales and taxa to assess the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity.