Community structure informs species geographic distributions.

ABSTRACT: Understanding what determines species' geographic distributions is crucial for assessing global change threats to biodiversity. Measuring limits on distributions is usually, and necessarily, done with data at large geographic extents and coarse spatial resolution. However, survival of individuals is determined by processes that happen at small spatial scales. The relative abundance of coexisting species (i.e. 'community structure') reflects assembly processes occurring at small scales, and are often available for relatively extensive areas, so could be useful for explaining species distributions. We demonstrate that Bayesian Network Inference (BNI) can overcome several challenges to including community structure into studies of species distributions, despite having been little used to date

SUBMITTER: Montesinos-Navarro A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5965839 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature