The Cretaceous breakup of Gondwana strongly modified the global distribution of shallow tropical seas reshaping the geographic configuration of marine basins. However, the links between tropical reef availability, plate tectonic processes and marine biodiversity distribution patterns are still unknown. Here, we show that a spatial diversification model constrained by absolute plate motions for the past 140 million years predicts the emergence and movement of diversity hotspots on tropical reefs. The spatial dynamics of tropical reefs explains marine fauna diversification in the Tethyan Ocean during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic, and identifies an eastward movement of ancestral marine lineages towards the Indo-Australian Archipelago in the Miocene. A mechanistic model based only on habitat-driven diversification and dispersal yields realistic predictions of current biodiversity patterns for both corals and fishes. As in terrestrial systems, we demonstrate that plate tectonics played a major role in driving tropical marine shallow reef biodiversity dynamics.

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked. This is particularly important in relation to effects of observation height (e.g. vegetation, snow and soil characteristics) and in habitats varying in their exposure to radiation, moisture and wind (e.g. topography, radiative forcing or cold-air pooling). Since organisms living close to the ground relate more strongly to these microclimatic conditions than to free-air temperatures, microclimatic ground and near-surface data are needed to provide realistic forecasts of the fate of such organisms under anthropogenic climate change, as well as of the functioning of the ecosystems they live in. To fill this critical gap, we highlight a call for temperature time series submissions to SoilTemp, a geospatial database initiative compiling soil and near-surface temperature data from all over the world. Currently, this database contains time series from 7,538 temperature sensors from 51 countries

Summary1. Plants protect themselves against herbivore attacks through a myriad of physical structures and toxic secondary metabolites. Together with abiotic factors, herbivores are expected to modulate plant defence strategies within plant assemblages. Because the abundance of insect herbivore decreases in colder environments, the palatability of plants in communities at higher elevation should shift in response to both abiotic and biotic factors. 2. We inventoried grasshopper communities to document changes in herbivore abundance along elevation gradients and quantified associated shifts in plant palatability. We measured plant palatability by measuring the growth of Spodoptera littoralis generalist caterpillars fed with the leaves of 172 plant species. We related plant palatability to leaf traits and elevation at the species and community levels. 3. In congruence with the decrease in grasshopper abundance with elevation, we found that the mean palatability level of plant communities increases with elevation. In addition, plant palatability was negatively associated with the community-weighted mean of leaf dry matter content. At the species level, plants with high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio were less palatable, while we found no effect of species mean elevation on plant palatability. 4. Synthesis. Our results suggest that plant communities at higher elevation are composed of species that are generally more palatable for insect herbivores. Shift in plant palatability with elevation may thus be the outcome of a relaxation of the in situ herbivore pressure and changes in abiotic conditions.