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Species that respond favourably to environmental change tend to be mobile or dispersive. Living within trees has some benefits over life on the ground. Species that move vertically within forest canopies can take advantage of increased complexity and resource availability, which should correspond to increased resilience to environmental variability and change. Here we show that two modes of movement, arboreality and horizontal dispersal, across an entire bioregional vertebrate fauna in the rain forests of Australia are associated with measures of historical environmental stability.

Wet Tropics, Queensland, Australia.

Historical (c. 20,000 years ago) and current (1990‐2009).

Mammal, bird, reptile, and frog species.

We analysed vertebrate distribution for 195 species and trait data from 20 years of standardized sampling. We derived an arboreality index (i.e …