Significance: Human impacts and climatic changes are widely considered to be responsible for rapid species extinction. However, determining their effects is challenging owing to the lack of long-term spatial–temporal data. In this study, we quantified the distinctive associations of anthropogenic and climatic stressors with the local extinction of 11 medium- or large-sized mammals using historical records over the past 3 centuries. We found that the increased local extinction of mammals was associated with intensified human disturbance (particularly for large-sized mammals) and with extreme temperature change (both cooling and warming). Our results provide insight into biodiversity conservation during the Anthropocene.

Animal‐mediated indirect interactions play a significant role in maintaining the biodiversity of plant communities. Less known is whether interspecific synchrony of seed rain can alter the indirect interactions of sympatric tree species. We assessed the seed dispersal success by tracking the fates of 21 600 tagged seeds from six paired sympatric tree species in both monospecific and mixed plots across 4 successive years in a subtropical forest. We found that apparent mutualism was associated with the interspecific synchrony of seed rain both seasonally and yearly, whereas apparent competition or apparent predation was associated with interspecific asynchrony of seed rain either seasonally or yearly. We did not find consistent associations of indirect interactions with seed traits. Our study suggests that the interspecific synchrony of seed rain plays a key role in the formation of animal‐mediated indirect interactions, which, in turn, may alter the seasonal or yearly seed rain schedules of sympatric tree species.

Significance: The lack of available data, including written historical sources and natural proxy archives, has constrained us when disentangling the effects of climate change on the prevalence of infectious diseases. We first reconstructed human epidemics in China over the last two millennia and analyzed the impacts of climate change on the prevalence of human epidemics at various time scales. We show that long-term trends of cold and dry conditions indirectly facilitated the prevalence of epidemics through locusts and famines. Nevertheless, temperature showed unstable associations with epidemics on a small time scale. Our study highlights the urgent need to investigate scale-dependent impacts of climate change on the prevalence of diseases.