The significance of geographic range size for spatial diversity patterns in Neotropical palms

By H. Kreft, J. Sommer, W. Barthlott. 2006

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the effect of range size in commonly applied macroecological analyses using continental distribution data for all 550 Neotropical palm species (Arecaceae) at varying grain sizes from 0.5" to 5°. First, we evaluated the relative contribution of range-restricted and widespread species on the patterns of species richness and endemism. Second, we analysed the impact of range size on the predictive value of commonly used predictor variables. Species sequences were produced arranging species according to their range size in ascending, descending, and random order. Correlations between the cumulative species richness patterns of these sequences and environmental predictors were performed in order to analyse the effect of range size. Despite the high proportion of rare species, patterns of species richness were found to be dominated by a minority of widespread species (∼20%) which contained 80% of the spatial information. Climatic factors related to energy and water availability and productivity accounted for much of the spatial variation of species richness of widespread species. In contrast, species richness of range-restricted species was to a larger extent determined by topographical complexity. However, this effect was much more difficult to detect due to a dominant influence of widespread species. Although the strength of different environmental predictors changed with spatial scale, the general patterns and trends proved to be relatively stabile at the examined grain sizes. Our results highlight the difficulties to approximate causal explanations for the occurrence of a majority of species and to distinguish between contemporary climatic factors and history.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09b7986604ae541ee46dcacea40bc0d108c5ea90

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Citations in the corpus

Odd man out: why are there fewer plant species in African rain forests? (2014, background): “In the Amazon, species diversity is highly correlated with rainfall and the length of the dry season is a limiting factor for a-diversity of tree species (Bjorholm et al. 2005; Kreft et al. 2006; Parmentier et al. 2007; ter Steege et al. 2006).”
Species Diversity and Growth Forms in Tropical American Palm Communities (2011, background): “Continental-scale studies have found water-energy availability to be the most important determinant of palm species richness (Bjorholm et al., 2005, 2006, 2008; Kreft et al., 2006; Svenning et al., 2008).”
A framework for delineating biogeographical regions based on species distributions (2010, background): “In the absence of quantitative regionalizations, pseudo-biogeographical divisions based on vegetation structure have been used extensively for broad-scale conservation analyses (Olson et al., 2001; Lamoreux et al., 2006).”
Biodiversity and extinction: the importance of being common (2008, background): “Empirical studies of variation in overall species richness of particular higher taxa have demonstrated that this is more strongly influenced by more widespread species, for birds across sub-Saharan Africa at a spatial resolution of one degree (Jetz and Rahbek, 2002), marine fi sh in one-degree latit”