Ecological communities that experience stable climate conditions have been speculated to preserve more specialized interspecific associations and have higher proportions of smaller ranged species (SRS). Thus, areas with disproportionally large numbers of SRS are expected to coincide geographically with a high degree of community-level ecological specialization, but this suggestion remains poorly supported with empirical evidence. Here, we analysed data for hummingbird resource specialization, range size, contemporary climate, and Late Quaternary climate stability for 46 hummingbird–plant mutualistic networks distributed across the Americas, representing 130 hummingbird species (ca 40% of all hummingbird species). We demonstrate a positive relationship between the proportion of SRS of hummingbirds and community-level specialization, i.e. the division of the floral niche among coexisting hummingbird species. This relationship remained strong even when accounting for climate, furthermore, the effect of SRS on specialization was far stronger than the effect of specialization on SRS, suggesting that climate largely influences specialization through species' range-size dynamics. Irrespective of the exact mechanism involved, our results indicate that communities consisting of higher proportions of SRS may be vulnerable to disturbance not only because of their small geographical ranges, but also because of their high degree of specialization.

叶子虽不及花朵那么绚烂夺目．却也默默地装点着自然界．带来勃勃生机。秋天更是叶子“走上前台”展现自己多姿多彩的迷人季节。古往今来．叶子一直是文人墨客感悟自然、寄托情怀的重要对象．”不知细叶谁裁出，二月春风似剪刀“”桑之未落．其叶沃若”“停车坐爱枫林晚，霜叶红于二月花““看万山红遍，层林尽染”，这些诗句也让叶片蒙上了层层诗意而浪漫的美感。

The Anthropocene is witnessing a loss of biodiversity, with well-documented declines in the diversity of ecosystems and species. For intraspecific genetic diversity, however, we lack even basic knowledge on its global distribution. We georeferenced 92,801 mitochondrial sequences for >4500 species of terrestrial mammals and amphibians, and found that genetic diversity is 27% higher in the tropics than in nontropical regions. Overall, habitats that are more affected by humans hold less genetic diversity than wilder regions, although results for mammals are sensitive to choice of genetic locus. Our study associates geographic coordinates with publicly available genetic sequences at a massive scale, yielding an opportunity to investigate both the drivers of this component of biodiversity and the genetic consequences of the anthropogenic modification of nature.%U http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/353/6307/1532.full.pdf

Lakes are widely distributed on the Mongolian Plateau and, as critical water sources, have sustained Mongolian pastures for hundreds of years. However, the plateau has experienced significant lake shrinkage and grassland degradation during the past several decades. To quantify the changes in all of the lakes on the plateau and the associated driving factors, we performed a satellite-based survey using multitemporal Landsat images from the 1970s to 2000s, combined with ground-based censuses. Our results document a rapid loss of lakes on the plateau in the past decades: the number of lakes with a water surface area >1 km2 decreased from 785 in the late 1980s to 577 in 2010, with a greater rate of decrease (34.0%) in Inner Mongolia of China than in Mongolia (17.6%). This decrease has been particularly pronounced since the late 1990s in Inner Mongolia and the number of lakes >10 km2 has declined by 30.0%. The statistical analyses suggested that in Mongolia precipitation was the dominant driver for the lake changes, and in Inner Mongolia coal mining was most important in its grassland area and irrigation was the leading factor in its cultivated area. The deterioration of lakes is expected to continue in the following decades not only because of changing climate but also increasing exploitation of underground mineral and groundwater resources on the plateau. To protect grasslands and the indigenous nomads, effective action is urgently required to save these valuable lakes from further deterioration.

<p>Dryland ecosystems are highly vulnerable to climatic and land-use changes, while the mechanisms underlying patterns of dryland species richness are still elusive. With distributions of 3637 native vascular plants, 154 mammals, and 425 birds in Xinjiang, China, we tested the water-energy dynamics hypothesis for species richness patterns in Central Asian drylands. Our results supported the water-energy dynamics hypothesis. We found that species richness of all three groups was a hump-shaped function of energy availability, but a linear function of water availability. We further found that water availability had stronger effects on plant richness, but weaker effects on vertebrate richness than energy availability. We conducted piecewise linear regressions to detect the breakpoints in the relationship between species richness and potential evapotranspiration which divided Xinjiang into low and high energy regions. The concordance between mammal and plant richness was stronger in high than in low energy regions, which was opposite to that between birds and plants. Plant richness had stronger effects than climate on mammal richness regardless of energy levels, but on bird richness only in high energy regions. The changes in the concordance between vertebrate and plant richness along the climatic gradient suggest that cautions are needed when using concordance between taxa in conservation planning.</p>

Kreft and Jetz’s critique of our recent update of Wallace’s zoogeographical regions disregards the extensive sensitivity analyses we undertook, which demonstrate the robustness of our results to the choice of phylogenetic data and clustering algorithm. Their suggested distinction between “transition zones” and biogeographic regions is worthy of further investigation but is thus far unsubstantiated.