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2 - Species–area curves and the geometry of nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
Michael W. Palmer
Edited by
David Storch ,
Pablo Marquet  and
James Brown
Michael W. Palmer
Affiliation:
Oklahoma State University
David Storch
Affiliation:
Charles University, Prague
Pablo Marquet
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
James Brown
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Summary

Introduction

It is widely appreciated that species distributions and biodiversity can be strongly related to environmental factors. Likewise, it is recognized that increasing environmental heterogeneity with area is one of the determinants of species–area relationships. However, few theoretical treatments of species–area relationships specifically address how biodiversity's increase with scale should be related to the geometry of the environment. I hypothesize that this geometry is the underlying reason for the triphasic species–area curve.

Gradient analysis

One of the oldest, strongest and least contentious generalizations in ecology is that the spatial distribution of species is due, at least in part, to variation in the environment. In particular, the abundance of a species tends to be a unimodal function of important environmental variables (Whittaker, 1975; ter Braak, 1987; Austin & Gaywood, 1994). Such functions are termed species response curves, and graphs of the response curves for all species in a region combined or coenoclines (Fig. 2.1) are in almost all ecological textbooks (for example, Begon, Harper & Townsend, 1996; Ricklefs, 2001) and have played important roles in the development of ecological theory (Whittaker, 1972; Shmida & Ellner, 1984; Tilman, 1988). The study of how species respond to gradients in the environment is known as gradient analysis (Whittaker, 1967; Austin, 1987; ter Braak & Prentice, 1988).

The unimodal species response curve is a simple manifestation of a species having an optimum set of environmental conditions. As conditions deviate from the optimum, the species will occur in less abundance.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scaling Biodiversity , pp. 15 - 31
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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