Ecological niche structure determines rangewide abundance patterns of species
Issue Date
2012-09-03Author
Martínez-Meyer, Enrique
Díaz-Porras, Daniel
Peterson, A. Townsend
Yáñez-Arenas, Carlos
Type
Dataset
Published Version
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120637Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Spatial abundance patterns across species’ ranges have seen intense attention in macroecology and biogeography. One key hypothesis has been that abundance declines with geographic distance from the range center (‘abundant-center hypothesis’), but tests of this idea have shown that the effect does not hold generally, and indeed may be true only in a minority of cases. We explore an alternative hypothesis: that species’ abundances decline with distance from the centroid of the species’ habitable conditions in environmental space (the ecological niche). We demonstrate consistent negative abundance-ecological distance relationships across 10 of 11 species (turtles to wolves), and that relationships in environmental space are consistently stronger than relationships in geographic space.
Description
data sets used in the paper: Martínez-Meyer, E., Díaz-Porras, D., Peterson, A. T. & Yáñez-Arenas, C. (2012) Ecological niche structure determines rangewide abundance patterns of species. Biology Letters.
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