Multiscale assessment of patterns of avian species richness

By C. Rahbek, G. Graves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2001

866 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The search for a common cause of species richness gradients has spawned more than 100 explanatory hypotheses in just the past two decades. Despite recent conceptual advances, further refinement of the most plausible models has been stifled by the difficulty of compiling high-resolution databases at continental scales. We used a database of the geographic ranges of 2,869 species of birds breeding in South America (nearly a third of the world's living avian species) to explore the influence of climate, quadrat area, ecosystem diversity, and topography on species richness gradients at 10 spatial scales (quadrat area, ≈12,300 to ≈1,225,000 km2). Topography, precipitation, topography × latitude, ecosystem diversity, and cloud cover emerged as the most important predictors of regional variability of species richness in regression models incorporating 16 independent variables, although ranking of variables depended on spatial scale. Direct measures of ambient energy such as mean and maximum temperature were of ancillary importance. Species richness values for 1° × 1° latitude-longitude quadrats in the Andes (peaking at 845 species) were ≈30–250% greater than those recorded at equivalent latitudes in the central Amazon basin. These findings reflect the extraordinary abundance of species associated with humid montane regions at equatorial latitudes and the importance of orography in avian speciation. In a broader context, our data reinforce the hypothesis that terrestrial species richness from the equator to the poles is ultimately governed by a synergism between climate and coarse-scale topographic heterogeneity.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e24c5bae71e633c5dc3395b394772f436bd7379

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Citations in the corpus

Patterns of vascular plant diversity at continental to global scales (2007, background): “…organisms (Lauer & Frankenberg 1979; Currie & Paquin 1987; Linder 1991; Currie 1991; Woodward & Rochefort 1991; O’Brien 1993, 1998; Carroll & Pearson 1998; Wohlgemuth 1998; Mutke 2000; Rahbek & Graves 2001; Kerr et al. 2001; Olff et al. 2002; Mutke et al. 2001; Mutke 2002; Francis & Currie 2003).”
Do we need land‐cover data to model species distributions in Europe? (2004, background): “This generalization is held to be true for species at a variety of spatial scales (Whittaker et al., 2001), although there is a wide recognition that the importance of climate is best expressed at large spatial scales ( Rahbek & Graves, 2001; Willis & Whittaker, 2002).”
The riverscape of Western Amazonia – a quantitative approach to the fluvial biogeography of the region (2007, methodology): “The same 1-degree grid system is often used in species-level studies of the region (e.g. Nelson et al., 1990; Rahbek & Graves, 2001; Tognelli & Kelt, 2004).”
Determinants of species richness, endemism and turnover in European longhorn beetles (2008, background): “of diversity gradients is scale-dependent and for this reason the explanatory power of variables depends on the grain size (Rahbek and Graves 2001).”
Beta diversity of angiosperms in temperate floras of eastern Asia and eastern North America (2004, background): “These differences can vary with spatial scale (Rahbek & Graves 2001; Whittaker et al. 2001) and they can have varied underlying causes.”
Invasibility and species richness of island endemic arthropods: a general model of endemic vs. exotic species (2006, background): “Climatic variables were investigated because they have been shown to be important correlates of diversity gradients for a variety of taxa (see, for example, Rahbek & Graves, 2001).”
Species–energy relationships and habitat complexity in bird communities (2004, background): “MacArthur 1964; Kerr & Packer 1997; Rahbek & Graves 2001 ), I am not aware of any that have suggested that heterogeneity might play a role in producing observed species–energy patterns.”
The geographic scaling of biotic interactions (2013, background): “The second emulates the traditional approach of ‘sampling’ species occurrences’ data in biogeography and macroecology (Rahbek and Graves 2001, Araújo 2004, Whittaker et al. 2005, McPherson et al. 2006, Nogués-Bravo and Araújo 2006), and counts species as co-occurring if both species are present…”
Are richness patterns of common and rare species equally well explained by environmental variables (2011, methodology): “Clearly there is a case for applying this approach to much larger scale data (Evans et al. 2005b) and ideally, multi-scale data (Lennon et al. 2001, Rahbek and Graves 2001), particularly in order to build mechanistic theory (Kerr et al. 2007).”
PRODUCTIVITY AND HISTORY AS PREDICTORS OF THE LATITUDINAL DIVERSITY GRADIENT OF TERRESTRIAL BIRDS (2003, background): “Rahbek and Graves (2001) also argued that habitat heterogeneity (again measured as range in elevation) predicts bird diversity in northern South America, although they did not include any measures of productivity.”
Predicting spatial patterns of plant species richness: a comparison of direct macroecological and species stacking modelling approaches (2011, methodology): “This approach has been used to better understand (Rahbek & Graves, 2001; Jetz & Rahbek, 2002; Moser et al., 2005) and predict (Luoto et al., 2004) SR for numerous taxonomic groups at a wide variety of scales.”
Geographical distribution and ecological conservatism of disjunct genera of vascular plants in eastern Asia and eastern North America (2004, methodology): “…data are available at a finer scale than we have used in recording geographical distribution, finer resolution of distribution, such as that used by Rahbek & Graves (2001), was not warranted because of the coarseness of the distribution maps, interpolation of the climate data between stations more…”
Building mountain biodiversity: Geological and evolutionary processes (2019, background): “In a recent global analysis, which also confirmed the classic correlation of species diversity with topographic relief and climate (3, 33, 34), Antonelli and co-workers (2) found correlations of species richness of mammals, birds, and amphibians with both long-term and short-term 5 erosion rates and”
Quaternary climate changes explain diversity among reptiles and amphibians (2008, background): “Studies have shown that contemporary climate is a poor predictor of species richness among narrow ranging species (Rahbek and Graves 2001, Jetz et al. 2004, Rahbek et al. 2007).”