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Frontiers of Biogeography 7.1 (2015): 21-28 This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. It is reproduced with permission ; Diversity patterns are governed by a complex network of interacting factors. Studies directed to disentangle the most important factors affecting diversity have frequently shown divergent results, which has encouraged a rewarding debate about the relative importance of each factor. Scale dependency has been identified as a direct cause of at least part of such divergences. However, studies with spatially-explicit measurements at different scales are costly and therefore they are relatively scarce despite their importance. Here, we present a database to disentangle the cross-scale variation in the importance of factors affecting the diversity of epiphytic bryophyte communities in Quercus dominated forests (Quercus ilex L., Quercus pyrenaica Willd. and Quercus faginea Lam.) in the North-western region of the Iberian Peninsula. We provide species-per-site abundance information with more than 9000 entries and an environmental table containing 20 in situ measured variables at three different scales (forest, stand, and sample). The database will help to advance the research of cross-scale effects of diversity patterns while at the same time providing valuable information on the distribution of a poorly known group of organisms ; The fieldwork was funded by the Spanish Government through grants CGL2007-61389, CGL2010-15693 and CGL2011-28857. N.G.M. was supported by a PhD grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education (grant number AP2007-00905)

Spanish DGCyT Ramon y Cajal fellowship ; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) ; FAPEG ; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) ; Portuguese Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia grant ; Spanish Ministry of Education FPU fellowship ; Spanish Government ; Biodiversity Conservation Plan from ENDESA S.A. ; CNPq: 563834/2010-2 ; CAPES: Auxpe 2036/2013 ; Portuguese Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia grantSFRH/BPD/70709/2010 ; Spanish Ministry of Education FPU fellowshipFPU12/00575 ; CNPq: 2011BR0071 ; Spanish GovernmentCGL2010-14841 ; Spanish Government427/2011 ; Biodiversity Conservation Plan from ENDESA S.A.6900014499 ; Macroecology studies large-scale patterns aiming to identify the effects of general ecological processes. Although lakes (and ponds) are particularly suited for macroecological research due to their discrete nature and non geographically-structured variability, the development of this discipline in lentic habitats is comparatively much smaller than for terrestrial environments. This is despite the interest of limnologists for large-scale phenomena, which results in the high level of development of some disciplines such as predictive limnology. Here we discuss how current state-of-the-art in macroecology may benefit from research in lentic habitats at five topics. First, by including an island biogeography analytical framework to incorporate the effects of lake origin and history on lentic biodiversity. Second, by studying local and regional effects on the latitudinal gradients of species richness. Third, by considering lakes and ponds altogether for the study of beta diversity and metacommunity structure, which is already common ground in limnological research. Fourth, by relating species traits with ecosystem structure and functioning; here we consider in particular the potential effects of body size-determined dispersal and competitive exclusion processes on lake-wide trophic organization. And fifth, by incorporating current research in functional (i.e., trait) and phylogenetic diversity to the study of community structure. We finally conclude that lentic habitats can be particularly important for the development of the most functional aspects of macroecology, due to the relative ease of studying the different biotic and abiotic components of the system separately, compared to most terrestrial systems. This can allow teasing apart many of the confounding factors that are characteristic of macroecological research, thus helping the development of future theoretical syntheses.