Congratulations to Dr. Flavia Montaño-Centellas (flamontano [at] gmail [dot] com) for her new publication in Journal of Biogeography.  Using datasets from montane gradients across the globe, Flavia tests Dan Janzen’s idea regarding “Why mountain passes are higher in the tropics” (American Naturalist, 1967) using multiple analyses of bird diversity across latitudinal gradients.  The study concludes that  “findings are consistent with tropical mountain assemblages containing species with narrow elevational distributions, low dispersal ability and potentially high allopatric speciation, resulting in high β-diversity across elevations. Contrasting results for Fβ indicate high niche packing in tropical assemblages, with most changes in functional diversity among assemblages involving species redundant in trait space.” To learn more, check out the online publication here.