Why are there so many species in the tropics?

By James H. Brown. Journal of Biogeography, 2013

802 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Known for centuries, the geographical pattern of increasing biodiversity from the poles to the equator is one of the most pervasive features of life on Earth. A longstanding goal of biogeographers has been to understand the primary factors that generate and maintain high diversity in the tropics. Many ‘historical’ and ‘ecological’ hypotheses have been proposed and debated, but there is still little consensus. Recent discussions have centred around two main phenomena: phylogenetic niche conservatism and ecological productivity. These two factors play important roles, but accumulating theoretical and empirical studies suggest that the single most important factor is kinetics: the temperature dependence of ecological and evolutionary rates. The relatively high temperatures in the tropics generate and maintain high diversity because ‘the Red Queen runs faster when she is hot’.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee0999d93a3fe9be3b02c4e178631fbee57026d0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Paleontology

Citations in the corpus

Historic and prehistoric human‐driven extinctions have reshaped global mammal diversity patterns (2015, background): “There is still substantial debate over the causes of the overall diversity gradients (Brown, 2014).”
Ecological and Evolutionary Drivers of Geographic Variation in Species Diversity (2015, neutral): “Moreover, the ecological limits theory has not identified a clear logical link between how the amount of resources is connected to a carrying capacity for the total number of individuals across all species and thus how resources can be directly linked to species diversity (Brown 2014).”
Topography-driven isolation, speciation and a global increase of endemism with elevation (Forthcoming) (2016, positive): “One prominent explanation, favoured by Rohde (1992), and more recently by Brown (2014) and others as part of the ‘metabolic theory of ecology’, proposes that speciation rate increases with temperature (Hypothesis 1).”