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The distributions of amphibians, birds and mammals have underpinned global and local conservation priorities, and have been fundamental to our understanding of the determinants of global biodiversity. In contrast, the global distributions of reptiles, representing a third of terrestrial vertebrate diversity, have been unavailable. This prevented the incorporation of reptiles into conservation planning and biased our understanding of the underlying processes governing global vertebrate biodiversity. Here, we present and analyse the global distribution of 10,064 reptile species (99% of extant terrestrial species). We show that richness patterns of the other three tetrapod classes are good spatial surrogates for species richness of all reptiles combined and of snakes, but characterize diversity patterns of lizards and turtles poorly. Hotspots of total and endemic lizard richness overlap very little with those of other taxa. Moreover, existing protected areas, sites of biodiversity significance and global conservation schemes represent birds and mammals better than reptiles. We show that additional conservation actions are needed to effectively protect reptiles, particularly lizards and turtles. Adding reptile knowledge to a global complementarity conservation priority scheme identifies many locations that consequently become important. Notably, investing resources in some of the world’s arid, grassland and savannah habitats might be necessary to represent all terrestrial vertebrates efficiently.

Summary 1. Understanding the processes responsible for macro-scale spatial and temporal phenological patterns is a critical step in developing predictive phenological models. While phenological responses may involve the integration of multiple environmental cues, the spring phenology of many plant and animal species appears to be especially sensitive to temperature. 2. As a result of the success of citizen science schemes in mobilizing amateur naturalists, for some parts of the world, there now exist extensive data sets of phenological timings, spanning many species, locations and years. In macroecology, two types of models – time windows and growing degree-days – are widely used to predict phenology on the basis of temperature. 3. Here, we compare the performance of the two methods in predicting spatiotemporal variation in the timing of Quercus robur first leafing. The methods agree on the time at which leafing becomes sensitive to temperature and provide weak support for a delay in initiation of thermal sensitivity with increasing latitude due to a day-length requirement. Both methods explain c. 50% of the variation in first dates and identify plasticity, rather than local adaptation, as the major cause of spatial covariation between temperature and phenology. For a 1C rise in spring temperatures we predict that a plastic response of first leafing will give rise to an advance of about seven days. 4. Synthesis: Time-window and growing degree-day methods provide remarkably congruent insights into the processes underpinning geographic variation in Quercus robur first leafing dates. We find that a spatially invariant plastic response to temperature dominates spatiotemporal phenological variation, which means that it may be reasonable to substitute space for time to project how this species will respond to climate change. This study demonstrates the contribution that top-down macroecological approaches can make to our understanding of the processes that give rise to intraspecific phenological variation.

Aim: Current climate, biotic habitat provision and historical events are known drivers of diversity patterns. However, these three factors are seldom evaluated together. Here, we study the influence of climate, the distribution of deciduous forests and Pleistocene climate changes on the species diversity of Carabus ground beetles in Europe. Location: Continental Europe. Methods: We used geographically weighted regressions (GWR) to explore geographical variation in the relationship between species richness and current climate in a spatially explicit context. Further, we analysed simultaneously the network of relationships among current temperature, climatic variability since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the distribution of deciduous forests through structural equation models (SEM). Also, we assessed dissimilarity in the composition of European faunas by means of beta diversity metrics related with true spatial replacement and nestedness. Results: We find that Carabus richness patterns are, at least in part, influenced by water–energy dynamics. However, the effects of current climate are also shaped by Pleistocene glaciations, as water and energy variables change in importance at the southern limits of the ice sheet during the LGM. Accordingly, this border results in abrupt shifts in the relative importance of both (1) current and past climate correlates on Carabus richness, and (2) nestedness and true turnover on the compositional changes among their assemblages. Moreover, we also detect a direct effect of the geographical distribution of deciduous forests on Carabus species richness in both northern and southern regions. Main conclusions: Our results confirm that the processes shaping diversity patterns may depend on the history of particular regions. While Carabus richness seems to be largely driven by current climate in southern Europe, in the north it appears to be more affected by the imprint of past climates. Our findings also suggest that the areas of influence of Pleistocene glaciations may depend on the idiosyncratic characteristics of particular taxa., This work was partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the DGCyT-funded projects SCARPO (CGL2011-29317 grant to J.H.) and SinFRAG (CGL2013-48768-P grant to M.A.R.), and by the UK National Environment Research Council. J.C. was supported by a FPU-fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU12/00575), and J.H. by a Spanish DGCyT Ramón y Cajal grant.

Phenology affects the abiotic and biotic conditions that an organism encounters and, consequently, its fitness. For populations of high-latitude species, spring phenology often occurs earlier in warmer years and regions. Here we apply a novel approach, a comparison of slope of phenology on temperature over space versus over time, to identify the relative roles of plasticity and local adaptation in generating spatial phenological variation in three interacting species, a butterfly, Anthocharis cardamines, and its two host plants, Cardamine pratensis and Alliaria petiolata. All three species overlap in the time window over which mean temperatures best predict variation in phenology, and we find little evidence that a day length requirement causes the sensitive time window to be delayed as latitude increases. The focal species all show pronounced temperature-mediated phenological plasticity of similar magnitude. While we find no evidence for local adaptation in the flowering times of the plants, geographic variation in the phenology of the butterfly is consistent with countergradient local adaptation. The butterfly's phenology appears to be better predicted by temperature than it is by the flowering times of either host plant, and we find no evidence that coevolution has generated geographic variation in adaptive phenological plasticity.

In this Article originally published, owing to a technical error, the author ‘Laurent Chirio’ was mistakenly designated as a corresponding author in the HTML version, the PDF was correct. This error has now been corrected in the HTML version. Further, in Supplementary Table 3, the authors misspelt the surname of ‘Danny Meirte’; this file has now been replaced.

Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on biodiversity, including increasing extinction rates. Current approaches to quantifying such impacts focus on measuring exposure to climatic change and largely ignore the biological differences between species that may significantly increase or reduce their vulnerability. To address this, we present a framework for assessing three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, namely sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity; this draws on species’ biological traits and their modeled exposure to projected climatic changes. In the largest such assessment to date, we applied this approach to each of the world’s birds, amphibians and corals (16,857 species). The resulting assessments identify the species with greatest relative vulnerability to climate change and the geographic areas in which they are concentrated, including the Amazon basin for amphibians and birds, and the central Indo-west Pacific (Coral Triangle) for corals. We found that high concentration areas for species with traits conferring highest sensitivity and lowest adaptive capacity differ from those of highly exposed species, and we identify areas where exposure-based assessments alone may over or under-estimate climate change impacts. We found that 608–851 bird (6–9%), 670–933 amphibian (11– 15%), and 47–73 coral species (6–9%) are both highly climate change vulnerable and already threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List. The remaining highly climate change vulnerable species represent new priorities for conservation. Fewer species are highly climate change vulnerable under lower IPCC SRES emissions scenarios, indicating that reducing greenhouse emissions will reduce climate change driven extinctions. Our study answers the growing call for a more biologically and ecologically inclusive approach to assessing climate change vulnerability. By facilitating independent assessment of the three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, our approach can be used to devise species and areaspecific conservation interventions and indices. The priorities we identify will strengthen global strategies to mitigate climate change impacts.

The workshop ‘ Spatial models in animal ecology, management and conservation ’ held at Silwood Park (UK), 9–11 March 2010, aimed to synthesize recent progress in modelling the spatial dynamics of individuals, populations and species ranges and to provide directions for research. It brought together marine and terrestrial researchers working on spatial models at different levels of organization, using empirical as well as theory-driven approaches. Different approaches, temporal and spatial scales, and practical constraints predominate at different levels of organization and in different environments. However, there are theoretical concepts and specific methods that can fruitfully be transferred across levels and systems, including: habitat suitability characterization, movement rules, and ways of estimating uncertainty.