▪ Abstract Movement between discrete habitat patches can present significant challenges to organisms. Freshwater invertebrates achieve dispersal using a variety of mechanisms that can be broadly categorized as active or passive, and which have important consequences for processes of colonization, gene flow, and evolutionary divergence. Apart from flight in adult freshwater insects, active dispersal appears relatively uncommon. Passive dispersal may occur through transport by animal vectors or wind, often involving a specific desiccation-resistant stage in the life cycle. Dispersal in freshwater taxa is difficult to study directly, and rare but biologically significant dispersal events may remain undetected. Increased use of molecular markers has provided considerable insight into the frequency of dispersal in freshwater invertebrates, particularly for groups such as crustaceans and bryozoans that disperse passively through the transport of desiccation-resistant propagules. The establishment of propagule banks in sediment promotes dispersal in time and may be particularly important for passive dispersers by allowing temporal escape from unfavorable conditions. Patterns that apply to dispersal in freshwater invertebrates can be readily extended to other freshwater taxa, since common challenges arise from the colonization of isolated aquatic systems.

Eight years after DNA barcoding was formally proposed on a large scale, CO1 sequences are rapidly accumulating from around the world. While studies to date have mostly targeted local or regional species assemblages, the recent launch of the global iBOL project (International Barcode of Life), highlights the need to understand the effects of geographical scale on Barcoding's goals. Sampling has been central in the debate on DNA Barcoding, but the effect of the geographical scale of sampling has not yet been thoroughly and explicitly tested with empirical data. Here, we present a CO1 data set of aquatic predaceous diving beetles of the tribe Agabini, sampled throughout Europe, and use it to investigate how the geographic scale of sampling affects 1) the estimated intraspecific variation of species, 2) the genetic distance to the most closely related heterospecific, 3) the ratio of intraspecific and interspecific variation, 4) the frequency of taxonomically recognized species found to be monophyletic, and 5) query identification performance based on 6 different species assignment methods. Intraspecific variation was significantly correlated with the geographical scale of sampling (R-square = 0.7), and more than half of the species with 10 or more sampled individuals (N = 29) showed higher intraspecific variation than 1% sequence divergence. In contrast, the distance to the closest heterospecific showed a significant decrease with increasing geographical scale of sampling. The average genetic distance dropped from > 7% for samples within 1 km, to < 3.5% for samples up to > 6000 km apart. Over a third of the species were not monophyletic, and the proportion increased through locally, nationally, regionally, and continentally restricted subsets of the data. The success of identifying queries decreased with increasing spatial scale of sampling; liberal methods declined from 100% to around 90%, whereas strict methods dropped to below 50% at continental scales. The proportion of query identifications considered uncertain (more than one species < 1% distance from query) escalated from zero at local, to 50% at continental scale. Finally, by resampling the most widely sampled species we show that even if samples are collected to maximize the geographical coverage, up to 70 individuals are required to sample 95% of intraspecific variation. The results show that the geographical scale of sampling has a critical impact on the global application of DNA barcoding. Scale-effects result from the relative importance of different processes determining the composition of regional species assemblages (dispersal and ecological assembly) and global clades (demography, speciation, and extinction). The incorporation of geographical information, where available, will be required to obtain identification rates at global scales equivalent to those in regional barcoding studies. Our result hence provides an impetus for both smarter barcoding tools and sprouting national barcoding initiatives—smaller geographical scales deliver higher accuracy.

Widespread recognition of the importance of biological studies at large spatial and temporal scales, particularly in the face of many of the most pressing issues facing humanity, has fueled the argument that there is a need to reinvigorate such studies in physiological ecology through the establishment of a macrophysiology. Following a period when the fields of ecology and physiological ecology had been regarded as largely synonymous, studies of this kind were relatively commonplace in the first half of the twentieth century. However, such large-scale work subsequently became rather scarce as physiological studies concentrated on the biochemical and molecular mechanisms underlying the capacities and tolerances of species. In some sense, macrophysiology is thus an attempt at a conceptual reunification. In this article, we provide a conceptual framework for the continued development of macrophysiology. We subdivide this framework into three major components: the establishment of macrophysiological patterns, determining the form of those patterns (the very general ways in which they are shaped), and understanding the mechanisms that give rise to them. We suggest ways in which each of these components could be developed usefully.

Despite evidence that organismal distributions are shifting in response to recent climatic warming, we have little information on direct links between species' physiology and vulnerability to climate change. We demonstrate a positive relationship between upper thermal tolerance and its acclimatory ability in a well-defined clade of closely related European diving beetles. We predict that species with the lowest tolerance to high temperatures will be most at risk from the adverse effects of future warming, since they have both low absolute thermal tolerance and poor acclimatory ability. Upper thermal tolerance is also positively related to species' geographical range size, meaning that species most at risk are already the most geographically restricted ones, being endemic to Mediterranean mountain systems. Our findings on the relationship between tolerance and acclimatory ability contrast with results from marine animals, suggesting that generalizations regarding thermal tolerance and responses to future rapid climate change may be premature.

Summary: 1. The geographical range sizes of individual species vary considerably in extent, although the factors underlying this variation remain poorly understood, and could include a number of ecological and evolutionary processes. A favoured explanation for range size variation is that this result from differences in fundamental niche breadths, suggesting a key role for physiology in determining range size, although to date empirical tests of these ideas remain limited.2. Here we explore relationships between thermal physiology and biogeography, whilst controlling for possible differences in dispersal ability and phylogenetic relatedness, across 14 ecologically similar congeners which differ in geographical range extent; European diving beetles of the genusDeronectesSharp (Coleoptera, Dytiscidae). Absolute upper and lower temperature tolerance and acclimatory abilities are determined for populations of each species, following acclimation in the laboratory.3. Absolute thermal tolerance range is the best predictor of both species’ latitudinal range extent and position, differences in dispersal ability (based on wing size) apparently being less important in this group. In addition, species’ northern and southern range limits are related to their tolerance of low and high temperatures respectively. In all cases, absolute temperature tolerances, rather than acclimatory abilities are the best predictors of range parameters, whilst the use of independent contrasts suggested that species’ thermal acclimation abilities may also relate to biogeography, although increased acclimatory ability does not appear to be associated with increased range size.4. Our study is the first to provide empirical support for a relationship between thermal physiology and range size variation in widespread and restricted species, conducted using the same experimental design, within a phylogenetically and ecologically controlled framework.