Edmund Basham

University of Texas at Austin | UT

Tropical land-use change is a key driver of global declines in biodiversity and a major source of anthropogenic carbon emissions, yet there is a substantial shortfall in the funding available to tackle these issues. We urgently need mechanisms that can simultaneously tackle both biodiversity and carbon losses, with carbon-based payments for ecosyst...

Assemblage similarity decays with geographic distance—a pattern known as the distance–decay relationship. While this pattern has been investigated for a wide range of organisms, ecosystems and geographical gradients, whether these changes vary more cryptically across different forest strata (from ground to canopy) remains elusive. Here, we investig...

Aim Tropical forests are vertically complex, and offer unique niche opportunities in the form of climate, habitat and resource gradients from ground to canopy. Rainforest species organize within this vertical spatial gradient and recent macroecological research suggests that the highest levels of vertical stratification occur in structurally comple...

Dendrobatid poison frogs sequester lipophilic alkaloids from their arthropod prey to use as a form of chemical defense. Some dendrobatid frogs seasonally migrate between the leaf litter of the forest floor in the dry season to the canopy in the wet season, which may yield differences in prey (arthropods) and therefore alkaloid availability over spa...

Tropical forests harbour the highest levels of terrestrial biodiversity and represent some of the most complex ecosystems on Earth, with a significant portion of this diversity above ground. Although the vertical dimension is a central aspect of the ecology of forest communities, there is little consensus as to prominence, evenness, and consistency...

Advances in genomic sequencing have magnified our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms relevant to biodiversity conservation. As a result, the field of conservation genomics has grown rapidly. Genomic data can be effective in guiding conservation decisions by revealing fine-scale patterns of genetic diversity and adaptation. Adap...

Tropical forests are vertically complex and offer unique niche opportunities in the form of resources, climate, and habitat gradients from the forest floor to the canopy. Rainforest amphibians have diversified within this vertical space, resulting in partitioned niches and corresponding morphological, behavioral, and reproductive traits. However, a...

Global warming is a great threat to biodiversity with negative impacts spanning the entire biological hierarchy. One of the main species’ traits determining survival at higher temperature is the thermal point at which an animal loses its ability to escape from deadly conditions (critical thermal maximum—CTmax). Variation in CTmax across species is...

In tropical forests, large, old trees (LOTs) can be considered keystone structures for provisioning unique habitats such as decaying wood, roots, cavities, and epiphytes, including those that hold water (phytotelmata). These habitats may also be stratified in vertical space, for example, root structures occur at ground level and below, whereas epip...

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...

Research in environmental science relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature at around 2 meter above ground1-3. These climatic grids however fail to reflect conditions near and below the soil surface, where critical ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage are controlled and most biodiversity resides4-8...

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 spatiote...

Global warming is having impacts across the Tree of Life. Understanding species’ physiological sensitivity to temperature change and how they relate to local temperature variation in their habitats is crucial to determining vulnerability to global warming. We ask how species’ vulnerability varies across habitats and elevations, and how climatically...

In tropical forests, epiphytes increase habitat complexity and provision services rare to canopy environments, such as water retention, nutrient cycling, and microclimate refuge. These services facilitate species diversity and coexistence in terrestrial ecosystems, and while their utility in forest ecosystems is appreciated for the Bromeliaceae of...

Given the dramatic loss of tropical forests and accelerating climate change, secondary forest regeneration is increasingly recognised as being an important method for reversing losses in biodiversity and carbon stocks. The recolonisation of biodiversity within secondary forests depends in part upon the recovery of forest structure, including the ra...