Disentangling the Role of Climate, Topography and Vegetation in Species Richness Gradients.

ABSTRACT: Environmental gradients (EG) related to climate, topography and vegetation are among the most important drivers of broad scale patterns of species richness. However, these different EG do not necessarily drive species richness in similar ways, potentially presenting synergistic associations when driving species richness. Understanding the synergism among EG allows us to address key questions arising from the effects of global climate and land use changes on biodiversity. Herein, we use variation partitioning (also know as commonality analysis) to disentangle unique and shared contributions of different EG in explaining species richness of Neotropical vertebrates. We use three broad sets of predictors to represent the environmental variability in (i) climate (annual mean temperature, temper

SUBMITTER: Moura MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4807822 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature