Using digital soil maps to infer edaphic affinities of plant species in Amazonia: Problems and prospects.

ABSTRACT: Amazonia combines semi-continental size with difficult access, so both current ranges of species and their ability to cope with environmental change have to be inferred from sparse field data. Although efficient techniques for modeling species distributions on the basis of a small number of species occurrences exist, their success depends on the availability of relevant environmental data layers. Soil data are important in this context, because soil properties have been found to determine plant occurrence patterns in Amazonian lowlands at all spatial scales. Here we evaluate the potential for this purpose of three digital soil maps that are freely available online: SOTERLAC, HWSD, and SoilGrids. We first tested how well they reflect local soil cation concentration as documented with 1,500

SUBMITTER: Moulatlet GM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5648677 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature