The ~1.97 million egg sets (~5 million eggs) housed in museums have not been used in proportion to their availability. We highlight the wide variety of scientific disciplines that have used egg collections and the geographic locations and sizes of these collections, to increase awareness of the importance of egg collections, improve their visibility to the scientific community, and suggest that they offer a wealth of data covering large spatial scales and long time series for broad investigations into avian biology. We provide a brief history of egg collections and an updated list of museums/institutions with egg collections worldwide. We also review the limitations, challenges, and management of egg collections, and summarize recent literature based on historical and recent museum egg materials.

Aim: Changes in climatic conditions are predicted to impact species distribution and hence alter their diversity patterns. Modifications in the composition of biological communities are expected as a result of the loss and replacement of species due to global warming. Forest frugivorous birds already suffer from habitat loss and may disappear locally due to suitable area contraction or range shifts to novel areas, disrupting seed dispersal and consequently the functioning of natural ecosystems. Here, we investigate the impacts of different climate scenarios on alpha and beta diversities of forest frugivorous birds.Location: Central Corridor of the Atlantic Forest (CCAF), Brazil.Methods: We used ecological niche models to project species distribution of 68 frugivorous birds for the baseline and future (2050 and 2070) scenarios. We generated binary maps of suitable areas for each species by climate scenario to calculate alpha and beta diversities.Results: Most forest frugivorous birds were projected to lose suitable area, as a consequence of climate change, reducing alpha diversity in future scenarios and increasing temporal beta diversity, which is dominated by the nestedness component. In addition, species richness decreased from the east to the west portion of the CCAF, while differentiation of bird communities increased in the same direction, a pattern consistent across all climate scenarios evaluated.Main conclusions: Climate change may exert drastic alterations in the composition of frugivorous bird communities in the CCAF. As forest frugivorous birds are critical to seed dispersal of forest plant species, impoverishment of their communities can drastically affect forest regeneration, diversity, and structure in the decades to come. Therefore, a better comprehension of spatio‐temporal changes in diversity patterns of frugivorous birds can help us to avoid the disruption of seed dispersal and its consequences, such as cascading effects that will trigger biodiversity loss in the CCAF.

The spatial exploration of richness, endemism, and evolutionary diversity patterns has become an important part of biogeographic research and conservation planning. As the volume and complexity of biogeographical and phylogenetic data increase, the need for efficient tools to manipulate and analyze these datasets becomes essential. The 'phyloraster' package addresses this need by facilitating the analysis of evolutionary diversity and endemism for rasters. Our package offers a set of functions to support the linkage of species distribution models (SDMs) with phylogenies, providing then an understanding of the spatial distribution of biodiversity. It covers three main stages: pre‐processing, processing, and post‐processing of macroecological and phylogenetic data. During the pre‐processing step, basic functions are provided to prepare the data. The processing step combines functions to calculate indices including species richness, Faith's phylogenetic diversity, phylogenetic endemism, weighted endemism, and evolutionary distinctiveness. Additionally, this step includes functions to compute the standardized effect size for each metric using spatial and phylogenetic randomization methods, ensuring proper control for richness effects. The post‐processing stage includes functions to calculate the change of metrics between different times (e.g. present and future). In relation to processing in our functions, we show that 'phyloraster' takes up considerably less RAM than the other packages when computing the same metrics (weighted endemism). Lower RAM usage minimizes the hardware requirements to work with high‐resolution datasets from local to global scales. This broadens user accessibility of the spatialized measures of endemism and evolutionary diversity.