Gamboa, SaraGalván Arcones, SofíaSobral Bernal, Mª MarHernández Fernández, ManuelVarela González, Sara2026-05-292026-05-292025-07-09Gamboa, S., Galván, S., Sobral, M., Hernández Fernández, M. and Varela, S. (2025), The division of food space among mammalian species on biomes. Ecography, 2025: e07660. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecog.076600906-7590https://hdl.handle.net/10347/47435Understanding how species' ecological partitioning functions across biomes is fundamental to macroecology and conservation biology. Here, we examine the global distribution of dietary strategies in terrestrial mammals, focusing on how biome specialization modulates trophic diversity and structure at a broad geographical scale. Using species-level data from over 3600 terrestrial mammal species, we constructed a multivariate dietary space and quantified the area, redundancy, dispersion, uniqueness, and turnover of trophic strategies across ten major biomes. Species were classified as biome specialists, moderate generalists, or extreme generalists based on their biome breadth. By analysing biome specialists and generalists separately, we show that biome specialists tend to exhibit more constrained and compositionally distinct dietary niches in less productive biomes, while generalists, particularly moderate generalists, dominate functional space occupancy in all biomes, even the harsher ones such as tundra and taiga. This highlights how environmental constraints and ecological roles shape trophic strategies at a global scale. Notably, extreme generalists tended to exhibit more carnivorous or insectivorous diets, suggesting a strategy based on mobile predation or opportunism rather than a highly diversified omnivory. Despite these general patterns, highly productive biomes supported the greatest diversity of dietary strategies, with higher functional redundancy and niche packing. Nestedness and turnover analyses revealed that biome specialists diets are often subsets of generalists diets, but with significant compositional shifts across biomes. These findings underscore the dual role of biome generalists as both functional stabilizers and potential limiters of ecological diversity, and highlight the vulnerability of specialist species to global change. Our study offers a mechanistic framework for understanding how dietary strategies interact with environmental filtering, and for identifying functional risks in changing ecosystems.eng© 2025 The Author(s). Ecography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Attribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Biome specializationDietFeeding strategiesGeneralistsMacroecologySpecialistsjournal article10.1002/ecog.076601600-0587open access