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In contrast with macroorganisms, whose geographical ranges are typically restricted, many microbial species appear to have cosmopolitan distributions. This observation has been explained as a consequence of ubiquitous dispersal caused by the enormous population sizes of microbial species. Recently, this "everything is everywhere, but, the environment selects" theory has been challenged by the detection of considerable regional genetic variability within microbial morphospecies. We demonstrate that, contrary to what is expected under ubiquitous dispersal, evidence of regional-scale metacommunity processes can be detected in microbial morphospecies. Our results imply that the microbial and macrobial world are structured by analogous processes.

Pither & Aarssen (2005) propose a null model approach to assess the proportion of niche specialist taxa along ecological gradients. They apply this methodology to a large data set of lacustrine diatom assemblages and conclude that a majority of the taxa are generalists on a pH gradient. This conflicts with previous work, which shows that many diatom taxa have a statistically significant relationship with pH. We demonstrate the methods used by Pither & Aarssen (2005) have a high Type II error for rare taxa, and that this problem is compounded by the non-uniform sampling of the pH gradient which effectively precludes acid-lake specialist diatoms from being recognized as such. We re-analyse the data used by Pither & Aarssen (2005) and show that most of the diatoms have a statistically significant relationship with pH, and we thus refute their conclusions that few diatom species are specialists.

Nine seedlots of the widely planted southern and central European native tree species Acer pseudoplatanus L. were collected along a north-south gradient spanning 21° of latitude in Europe. We investigated how the heat sum during seed development influences seed maturity as assessed by physical, physiological and biochemical traits. Using principal component analysis we found predictable and consistent patterns in all traits, which correlated with heat sum. For example, compared with fruits from their native range (Italy and France, heat sum >3000°C d), fruits from the coldest location (Scotland; heat sum of 1873°C d) were shorter (c. 30 v. 42 mm), germinated over a narrower temperature range (5-20 v. 5-35°C) and had smaller embryos (28 v. > 70 mg) with a higher water content (c. 63 v. 48%), less negative solute potentials (c. -2.4 v. -4.1 MPa) and were more desiccation sensitive (critical water potential of -20.2 v. -55.4 to -60.7 MPa). The observed level of desiccation-tolerance for the French and Italian seedlots is more consistent with the intermediate category than the previous classification of A. pseudoplatanus as recalcitrant. Our results demonstrate that a lower heat sum causes fruits from northern Europe to be dispersed before maximum potential seed quality is achieved.

It has been hypothesised that climate change may affect vegetation by changing the outcome of competitive interactions. We use a space-for-time approach to evaluate this hypothesis in the context of alpine time-of-snowmelt gradients. Principal response curves, a multivariate repeated-measurement analysis technique, are used to analyse for compositional differences in local ridge-to-snowbed gradients among 100 m altitudinal bands from 1,140 to 1,550 m a.s.l., corresponding to a temperature gradient of 2.5 degrees C (local lapse rate is 0.6 degrees C). The interaction between time-of-snowmelt and altitude is strongly significant statistically, indicating that the altitudinal gradient cannot be explained simply by the physiological responses of the species, but that there are also changes in the outcome of competitive interactions. At higher altitudes, there is a decrease in the time-of-snowmelt ranges of species which have intermediate times-of-snowmelt optima, whereas snowbed (chinophilous) species have wider time-of-snowmelt ranges. As snowbed species can survive, grow and reproduce at very early snow-free sites at high altitudes, the most likely explanation for their absence from all but the latest time-of-snowmelt habitats at lower altitudes is competitive exclusion by more vigorous lee-side species. This suggests that with future climate change snowbed species will experience, in addition to habitat fragmentation and reduced size of habitats due to increased temperature and snowmelt, an indirect effect due to competitive exclusion from late-snowmelt sites by species that have their optima outside snowbeds.