Francis Petter

Located at the crossroad of the Palearctic, Saharo-Arabian, and Oriental zoogeographic realms, and with its great environmental diversity, Iran harbors a high complexity and richness of fauna and flora. Knowledge about the Iranian mammal fauna has greatly increased over recent years thanks to the gr…

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an unprecedented global development program that involves nearly half of the world’s countries [1]. It not only will have economic and political influences, but also may generate multiple environmental challenges and is a focus of considerable academic and p…

Determining the mechanisms that underlie species distributions and assemblages is necessary to effectively preserve biodiversity. This cannot be accomplished by examining a single taxonomic group, as communities comprise a plethora of interactions across species and trophic levels. Here, we examine …

The American tropics (the Neotropics) are the most species-rich realm on Earth, and for centuries, scientists have attempted to understand the origins and evolution of their biodiversity. It is now clear that different regions and taxonomic groups have responded differently to geological and climati…