It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

The latest issue of the PNAS features a very interesting study, led by Justin Yeakel, “Collapse of an ecological network in Ancient Egypt”. The Authors studied the ecological effects of the extinction of mammalian species in  Egypt, taking a very creative and remarkable approach in order to gather the data; they used artistic records found in tombs and in decorative objects produced over the past 6,000 years by the Egyptians in order to infer species extinctions and ecological dynamics. Their findings suggest that mammalian extinctions were non random and that large changes in the organization of these ecological systems coincide with periods of extreme drought and with the densification of the Egyptian population. Moreover, the decrease of diversity has led to an increase in the fragility of these ecological systems due to the loss of functional redundancy.

Adam M. Lawson and Jason T. Weir tested  whether the rate of climatic-niche evolution  of bird species varies with latitude, in a new preprint in Ecology Letters titled “Latitudinal gradients in climatic-niche evolution accelerate trait evolution at high latitudes“. The authors found a positive relationship between  latitude and the rates of climatic-niche evolution and that climatic differentiation is often associated with divergence in traits indicative of ecological differentiation and reproductive isolation.

 At last, I am happy to announce a new article, I co-authored with Jon Lefcheck and John Griffin, titled “Choosing and using multiple traits in functional diversity research”. In this commentary, we provide a brief discussion on choosing and using functional traits and some recommendations for best practice. We also explored, superficially, the behavior of some of the most used functional diversity indices, in terms of trait correlation, number of traits and species richness. If you are interested, check out the appendices to see the complete result of our simulation study and the R code for implementing it.

– Vinicius Bastazini.