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The Country Compendium of the Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species (GRIIS) is a collation of data across 196 individual country checklists of alien species, along with a designation of those species with evidence of impact at a country level. The Compendium provides a baseline for monitoring the distribution and invasion status of all major taxonomic groups, and can be used for the purpose of global analyses of introduced (alien, non-native, exotic) and invasive species (invasive alien species), including regional, single and multi-species taxon assessments and comparisons. It enables exploration of gaps and inferred absences of species across countries, and also provides one means for updating individual GRIIS Checklists. The Country Compendium is, for example, instrumental, along with data on first records of introduction, for assessing and reporting on invasive alien species targets, including for the Convention on Biological Diversity and Sustainable Development Goals. The GRIIS Country Compendium provides a baseline and mechanism for tracking the spread of introduced and invasive alien species across countries globally. Design Type(s) Data integration objective ● Observation design Measurement Type(s) Alien species occurrence ● Evidence of impact invasive alien species assessment objective Technology Type(s) Agent expert ● Data collation Factor Type(s) Geographic location ● Origin / provenance ● Habitat Sample Characteristics - Organism Animalia ● Bacteria ● Chromista ● Fungi ● Plantae ● Protista (Protozoa) ● Viruses Sample Characteristics - Location Global countries

A standardized delineation of the world’s mountains has many applications in research, education, and the science-policy interface. Here we provide a new inventory of 8616 mountain ranges developed under the auspices of the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA). Building on an earlier compilation, the presented geospatial database uses a further advanced and generalized mountain definition and a semi-automated method to enable globally standardized, transparent delineations of mountain ranges worldwide. The inventory is presented on EarthEnv at various hierarchical levels and allows users to select their preferred level of regional aggregation from continents to small subranges according to their needs and the scale of their analyses. The clearly defined, globally consistent and hierarchical nature of the presented mountain inventory offers a standardized resource for referencing and addressing mountains across basic and applied natural as well as social sciences and a range of other uses in science communication and education.

Habitat transformations caused by human land-use change are considered major drivers of ongoing biodiversity loss1–3, and their impact on biodiversity is expected to increase further this century4–6. Here, we used global decadal land-use projections to year 2070 for a range of shared socioeconomic pathways, which are linked to particular representative concentration pathways, to evaluate potential losses in range-wide suitable habitat and extinction risks for approximately 19,400 species of amphibians, birds and mammals. Substantial declines in suitable habitat are identified for species worldwide, with approximately 1,700 species expected to become imperilled due to land-use change alone. National stewardship for species highlights certain South American, Southeast Asian and African countries that are in particular need of proactive conservation planning. These geographically explicit projections and model workflows embedded in the Map of Life infrastructure are provided to facilitate the scrutiny, improvements and future updates needed for an ongoing and readily updated assessment of changing biodiversity. These forward-looking assessments and informatics tools are intended to support national conservation action and policies for addressing climate change and land-use change impacts on biodiversity. This paper uses a range of shared socioeconomic pathways scenarios to estimate the future terrestrial vertebrate habitat loss and extinction risk that could result from projected global land-use change.

Mountain ranges harbour exceptionally high biodiversity, which is now under threat from rapid environmental change. However, despite decades of effort, the limited availability of data and analytical tools has prevented a robust and truly global characterization of elevational biodiversity gradients and their evolutionary origins. This has hampered a general understanding of the processes involved in the assembly and maintenance of montane communities. Here we show that a worldwide mid-elevation peak in bird richness is driven by wide-ranging species and disappears when we use a subsampling procedure that ensures even species representation in space and facilitates evolutionary interpretation. Instead, richness corrected for range size declines linearly with increasing elevation. We find that the more depauperate assemblages at higher elevations are characterized by higher rates of diversification across all mountain regions, rejecting the idea that lower recent diversification rates are the general cause of less diverse biota. Across all elevations, assemblages on mountains with high rates of past temperature change exhibit more rapid diversification, highlighting the importance of climatic fluctuations in driving the evolutionary dynamics of mountain biodiversity. While different geomorphological and climatic attributes of mountain regions have been pivotal in determining the remarkable richness gradients observed today, our results underscore the role of ongoing and often very recent diversification processes in maintaining the unique and highly adapted biodiversity of higher elevations.

Estimates of recent biodiversity change remain inconsistent, debated, and infrequently assessed for their functional implications. Here, we report that spatial scale and type of biodiversity measurement influence evidence of temporal biodiversity change. We show a pervasive scale dependence of temporal trends in taxonomic (TD) and functional (FD) diversity for an ~50-year record of avian assemblages from North American Breeding Bird Survey and a record of global extinctions. Average TD and FD increased at all but the global scale. Change in TD exceeded change in FD toward large scales, signaling functional resilience. Assemblage temporal dissimilarity and turnover (replacement of species or functions) declined, while nestedness (tendency of assemblages to be subsets of one another) increased with scale. Patterns of FD change varied strongly among diet and foraging guilds. We suggest that monitoring, policy, and conservation require a scale-explicit framework to account for the pervasive effect that scale has on perceived biodiversity change., The evidence for and implications of biodiversity change remain widely debated. Jarzyna and Jetz demonstrate a strong and varying scale dependence of avian taxonomic and functional diversity, highlighting the importance of scale when assessing biodiversity change.

Topographic variation underpins a myriad of patterns and processes in hydrology, climatology, geography and ecology and is key to understanding the variation of life on the planet. A fully standardized and global multivariate product of different terrain features has the potential to support many large-scale research applications, however to date, such datasets are unavailable. Here we used the digital elevation model products of global 250 m GMTED2010 and near-global 90 m SRTM4.1dev to derive a suite of topographic variables: elevation, slope, aspect, eastness, northness, roughness, terrain roughness index, topographic position index, vector ruggedness measure, profile/tangential curvature, first/second order partial derivative, and 10 geomorphological landform classes. We aggregated each variable to 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 km spatial grains using several aggregation approaches. While a cross-correlation underlines the high similarity of many variables, a more detailed view in four mountain regions reveals local differences, as well as scale variations in the aggregated variables at different spatial grains. All newly-developed variables are available for download at Data Citation 1 and for download and visualization at http://www.earthenv.org/topography.

Remote sensing and geographic analysis of woody vegetation provide means of evaluating the distribution of natural resources, patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem structure, and socio-economic drivers of resource utilization. While these methods bring geographic datasets with global coverage into our day-to-day analytic spheres, many of the studies that rely on these strategies do not capitalize on the extensive collection of existing field data. We present the methods and maps associated with the first spatially-explicit models of global tree density, which relied on over 420,000 forest inventory field plots from around the world. This research is the result of a collaborative effort engaging over 20 scientists and institutions, and capitalizes on an array of analytical strategies. Our spatial data products offer precise estimates of the number of trees at global and biome scales, but should not be used for local-level estimation. At larger scales, these datasets can contribute valuable insight into resource management, ecological modelling efforts, and the quantification of ecosystem services.

Nature Plants 2, 16024 (2016); published online 2 March 2016; corrected 14 March 2016 A Supplementary Information file was inadvertently omitted from the Comment when originally published; this has now been rectified.

The change in number of terrestrial vertebrate species or endemics with sampled area is characterized by universal curves whose properties depend only on the mean geographic range size of species. The increase in species richness with area is one of the few known law-like biodiversity patterns. This study assembles species–area and endemics–area relationships for 12,000 bird, mammal and amphibian species across the continents. These relationships are important for conservation biology because they can be used to predict extinctions, but their shape and universality across taxa have not been well studied. What emerges is a fundamental connection between the size of species' geographic ranges and the spatial 'scaling' of biodiversity that yields a single species-area curve for all taxa and continents. The relationship between area and number of endemic species exhibits similar universality. These findings have important implications for conservation strategies at times of habitat loss. Despite the broad conceptual and applied relevance of how the number of species or endemics changes with area (the species–area and endemics–area relationships (SAR and EAR)), our understanding of universality and pervasiveness of these patterns across taxa and regions has remained limited. The SAR has traditionally been approximated by a power law1, but recent theories predict a triphasic SAR in logarithmic space, characterized by steeper increases in species richness at both small and large spatial scales2,3,4,5,6. Here we uncover such universally upward accelerating SARs for amphibians, birds and mammals across the world’s major landmasses. Although apparently taxon-specific and continent-specific, all curves collapse into one universal function after the area is rescaled by using the mean range sizes of taxa within continents. In addition, all EARs approximately follow a power law with a slope close to 1, indicating that for most spatial scales there is roughly proportional species extinction with area loss. These patterns can be predicted by a simulation model based on the random placement of contiguous ranges within a domain. The universality of SARs and EARs after rescaling implies that both total and endemic species richness within an area, and also their rate of change with area, can be estimated by using only the knowledge of mean geographic range size in the region and mean species richness at one spatial scale.

Mistnet data and wing-lengths of Blackcaps trapped at the northern border of the Alps on their way from northern Europe southward showed a similar but shifted migration pattern in the two periods 1966–78 and 1987–93. The onset of the migration has delayed about one five-day period, the median is six days later. Simultaneously, in northern Europe mean temperatures in autumn have raised. The later onset of migration is interpreted as the prompt microevolutionary reaction to advantages caused by the warming of climate.

Nature 525, 201–205 (2015); doi:10.1038/nature14967 In the first boldface paragraph of this Article, the global number of trees should be approximately ‘1.30 trillion’ (rather than ‘1.39 trillion’) for tropical and subtropical forests and ‘0.66 trillion’ (rather than ‘0.61 trillion’) for temperate regions.