Typically, termites are treated as a single guild, which ignores important internal diversity, including diverse feeding and nesting traits. These termite traits are crucial for both ecosystem‐level fluxes and trophic webs, with implications for vertebrate species. Despite their ecological importance, the large‐scale distribution of termite feeding and nesting traits and the relationship with termite diversity is largely unknown. We investigated whether functional diversity, species richness and feeding (wood, litter, grass and dung) and nesting trait (aboveground mound, belowground nest, inside tree or outside tree nest) distributions of termites were climatically controlled. To address this gap, we assembled a continental‐scale database of termite traits and occurrence in Australia and modelled termite nesting and feeding traits in response to macroclimate. Functional richness and evenness increased primarily with temperature. Australia showed multiple hotspots of termite diversity with each hotspot showing a distinct guild composition. The large‐scale distribution of nesting traits showed that aboveground nesting species were the most common nesting guild in the dry and wet tropics, while belowground nesting dominated in seasonally cold arid environments, demonstrating a strong climatic control on nesting strategy. Given their large biomass and many interactions with other species, the macroecology of termite traits may be especially important in predicting shifts in other species' distributions at continental and global scales.

Water voles (Arvicola amphibius) have undergone a rapid decline in the U.K. over the last few decades, due in part to the high predation pressure from introduced American mink (Neovison vison) (hereafter "mink") (Strachan, 2011). The water vole population within the Greater Easterhouse area of Glasgow was recently found to be of national importance, since this area contains some sites with the highest densities of water voles recorded within the U.K. (Stewart et al., 2017, 2019). Although these populations are fossorial in dry grassland, the extensive network of watercourses within the Greater Glasgow area (Fig. 1) and the proximity to the Seven Lochs Wetland Park may make these populations potentially at risk from mink invasion. Mink are distributed throughout the Greater Glasgow area (64 identified records) with the highest frequency of reports on the River Kelvin and the Forth and Clyde Canal, based on 1997-2017 records (Glasgow Museum Biological Record Centre, 2018; National Biodiversity Network Atlas, 2018). Interestingly, there seems to be few records of mink within the east of Glasgow (Fig. 1). This could be due to either the unsuitability of habitat for mink establishment or a lack of recording effort within the area. Mink could potentially access the fossorial water vole populations through the Luggie Water. This watercourse is directly connected to the River Kelvin and the Forth and Clyde Canal and linked to the Seven Lochs Wetland Park through the Bothlin Burn, therefore potentially serving as a corridor for mink (Fig. 2). Indeed, there was a recent sighting of mink on Johnston Loch, Gartcosh, in September 2014 (R.A. Stewart, unpublished data), which suggests that they are already present within the area. Fig. 1. Map of Greater Glasgow showing above-ground watercourses (blue) and underground watercourses (black). Water vole records 1994-2017 (yellow circles) and American mink records 1997-2017 (light blue circles) are plotted.

The 5500 km long dingo barrier fence (DBF) is a boundary at which the goal of dingo control programs shifts from management to elimination. Since 1980 ecologists have used the discrepancies in dingo densities across the DBF to study the ecological role of Australia’s largest terrestrial predator. We used drone imagery, ground based shrub and tree counts, and camera trap footage to test our hypothesis that there are alternate states in plant, bird and mammal assemblages on either side of the DBF. We found that shrubs and trees were twice as dense where dingoes were rare, and 28 % of shrub and tree species, 78 % of mammal species, and 14 % of bird species recorded were significantly more likely to occur on one side of the DBF than the other. We provide the first comprehensive snapshot of how flora and fauna assemblages differ across the DBF. This study adds to literature demonstrating that the removal of the dingo has led to profound shifts in the shrub, mammal and bird assemblages in arid Australia. Any expansion of dingo control in arid Australia must be considered against the far-reaching consequences for ecosystem assembly associated with the removal of a top predator.

Aim: Eucalypts have a widespread global distribution owing to their popularity for agroforestry and as environmental plantings. Despite an abundance of site-specific evidence that eucalypts modify soils and soil processes, we lack a quantitative synthesis of their overall effects at the global scale. This limits our capacity to assess the likely impacts of future introductions in any given region of the world.

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