Individuals allocate considerable amounts of energy to movement, which ultimately affects their ability to survive and reproduce. Birds fly by flapping their wings, which is dependent on the chemical energy produced by muscle work, or use soaring-gliding flight, in which chemical energy is replaced with energy harvested from moving air masses. Flapping flight requires more energy than soaring-gliding flight, and this difference in the use of energy increases with body mass. However,...

Understanding the factors promoting species formation is a major task in evolutionary biology research. In this project, funded by the Severo Ochoa-EBD microproject initiative, we have studied the evolutionary history of the six putative species included within the Californian scrub white oak species complex (genus Quercus).

The matching habitat choice hypothesis holds that individuals with different phenotypes select the habitats to which they are best adapted to maximize fitness. Despite the potential implications of matching habitat choice for many ecological and evolutionary processes, very few studies have tested its predictions. Here, a 26-year dataset on a spatially structured population of pied flycatchers is used to test whether phenotype-dependent dispersal and habitat selection translate into increased...

The Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the United Nations’ Strategic Plan for Biodiversity set ambitious goals for protecting biodiversity. The availability of biodiversity data is a key requirement to address biodiversity loss. Key gaps, however, remain in our knowledge of biodiversity. These are mostly a result of barriers preventing existing data from being discoverable, accessible and digestible. In this paper, what BONs can do to address these barriers is described

In this study, the consequences of the decay of wild rabbit populations have been modelled in the population size of Egyptian vultures. The decrease in this main food source led the vultures to invade foreign areas with higher levels of non-natural mortality, at the same time that the dominant competitor griffon vulture increased its population size. This scenario resulted in the decrease of the population size of Egyptian vulture. By employing modelling methods, this study predicted that...