16
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Model selection and information theory in geographical ecology

      , ,
      Global Ecology and Biogeography
      Wiley-Blackwell

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Related collections

          Most cited references36

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Predictions and tests of climate-based hypotheses of broad-scale variation in taxonomic richness

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Spatial autocorrelation and red herrings in geographical ecology

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Multiscale assessment of patterns of avian species richness.

              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, approximately 12,300 to approximately 1,225,000 km(2)). Topography, precipitation, topography x 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 degrees x 1 degrees latitude-longitude quadrats in the Andes (peaking at 845 species) were approximately 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.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Global Ecology and Biogeography
                Global Ecol Biogeography
                Wiley-Blackwell
                1466-822X
                1466-8238
                July 2008
                July 2008
                : 17
                : 4
                : 479-488
                Article
                10.1111/j.1466-8238.2008.00395.x
                b2ac96f6-a0c8-4509-9db6-c53de2f05caf
                © 2008

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article