Acoustic communication structures interactions among individuals and species throughout the avian life cycle. The intraspecific diversity of bird vocalisations reflects adaptive strategies to cope with variations in the acoustic environment over time and space. Additionally, the composition of species assemblages can influence how acoustic functions are spatially distributed across the landscape. Using data from 2,427 bird assemblages across France, we tested whether the diversity of acoustic traits in local bird assemblages varies along climate and landscape gradients. We quantified 16 acoustic traits from field recordings expressing the frequency, complexity, rhythm, and duration of vocalisations for 117 species. We employed a five-table ordination analysis to investigate links between acoustic traits and bioclimatic and land-use gradients, accounting for spatial and phylogenetic dependencies. We analysed how the average acoustic trait composition of bird assemblages shifted along environmental gradients for three key acoustic traits. We found that acoustic traits were clustered along environmental gradients, with a phylogenetic signal, supporting the prediction that acoustic strategies are phylogenetically conserved. Our results indicated that bird species share similar acoustic traits in assemblages under the same climatic envelopes (e.g., lower complexity and isochronous rhythms under higher precipitation and temperature seasonality). We found mixed support for the hypothesis that habitat selection shapes the acoustic composition of species assemblages, such that vocalisations are adapted to sound propagation properties of any given habitat. For instance, urbanisation was correlated with complex vocalisations featuring large spectral bandwidths. These wide bandwidths support the prediction that urban assemblages consist of species capable of avoiding acoustic masking caused by noise pollution. However, their complexity may hinder their transmission due to the same noise interference. Overall, our study highlights how bioclimatic and landscape-scale habitat features, alongside niche conservatism, collectively shape acoustic trait assemblages across large spatial extents.

Understanding why some species succeed in naturalizing and invading ecosystems, while others do not, has intrigued scientists since Darwin’s time. The Pre-Adaptation Hypothesis posits that introduced species closely related to natives, and thus ecologically similar, are more likely to establish. This concept aligns with the Climate Matching Hypothesis, which emphasizes environmental similarity between native and invaded regions as a key factor in invasion success. However, conflicting evidence leaves the role of biogeographic origin and climatic affinity in predicting invasion risk unresolved. Here, we examine how biogeographical origin, climatic matching, and inter- and intraspecific pre-adaptation influence the success of congeneric plant species introduced to the Canary Islands, an oceanic archipelago with Mediterranean climatic affinities. We integrated phylogenetic, climatic and occurrence data at two levels: (i) interspecific comparisons of phylogenetic distances and climatic similarity between each introduced species and its closest native counterpart; and (ii) intraspecific analysis of climatic niche dynamics between native and introduced ranges. Most introduced congeneric species originate from the Mediterranean Basin and temperate Europe, with a notable contribution from the Neotropics. While Mediterranean and temperate European introduced taxa were phylogenetically closer to native Canarian species, we found no consistent evidence of pre-adaptation when climatic similarity among congeneric species pairs was also considered. In contrast, intraspecific analyses revealed widespread niche expansion, regardless of origin. However, species from the Mediterranean and Neotropical origin displayed a greater effect on climatic niche stability, suggesting stronger climatic matching. Overall, our findings highlight the prevalence of niche shifts among introduced plant species and underscore the role of climatic niche expansion in facilitating biological invasions. These results have key implications for assessing invasion risks in increasingly disturbed insular regions worldwide.

The stress-gradient hypothesis posits that species interactions should be competitive in benign environments but tend toward being facilitative in stressful environments. However, this hypothesis has rarely been tested in animal communities. We capitalized on a 13-year, landscape-scale dataset, collected annually in a relatively stable old-growth forest environment to test the long-held hypothesis that the strength and direction of species interactions might be mediated by climatic conditions. It is generally accepted that competitive and facilitative interactions drive the distributions of many species. However, climate-envelope models generally ignore species interactions which may partly explain poor predictive performance of species distribution models in the face of climate change. Using multi-species dynamic occupancy models, we tested whether interannual settlement by one bird species could affect either the persistence or settlement by another phylogenetically related species, and whether these interactions are mediated by microclimate. The high spatiotemporal variability in avian local colonization and extinction dynamics in this landscape affords the opportunity for a rigorous, albeit correlative, natural experimental test of the stress-gradient hypothesis. We found that species interactions were influenced by microclimate for some, but not all avian species pairs. Related species pairs more often showed settlement dynamics that were indicative of attraction rather than repulsion. In some cases, competitive interactions at warmer climates flipped to become attractive interactions in colder microclimates – supporting the stress-gradient hypothesis. However, the reverse was also true: facilitative interactions amplified for some species under warm conditions. Our results highlight the importance of using long-term data to incorporate competitive and facilitative interactions into species distribution models and provide preliminary evidence for the stress-gradient hypothesis in birds.

The R package biomod2 is one of the most widely used and versatile tools for species distribution modelling (SDM), enabling ecologists to calibrate, evaluate, and project species–environment relationships across space and time using multiple modelling algorithms and ensemble forecasting. Since its initial release, the package has undergone continuous improvement. Here, we present its latest and most comprehensive version, which substantially expands its scope by integrating diverse ecological data types into a unified modelling workflow. Beyond presence-only and presence–absence data, biomod2 now accommodates a wide range of abundance formats, including counts, multi-class abundance categories, and relative or absolute abundances, thereby also extending its applications to modelling biomass, land cover, and habitat suitability. We have fully restructured the workflow to improve usability and reproducibility, introducing clearer function organization, standardized parameter names, and substantially revised documentation. The update also includes new methodological features such as enhanced cross-validation schemes, improved pseudo-absence selection strategies, expanded model parametrization options, additional algorithms, and new tools for exploring and visualizing outputs. Together, these developments provide a more flexible, transparent, and easily shareable framework for species distribution modelling, supporting robust inference across a broad range of ecological questions.