Revealing patterns of local species richness along environmental gradients with a novel network tool
Authors
Baudena, M.; Sánchez, A.; Co-Pierre, G.; Ruiz Benito, Paloma; Rodríguez Fernández, Miguel Ángel; [et al.]Date
2015Funders
Comunidad de Madrid
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Bibliographic citation
Nature Scientific Reports, 2015, v. 5, n. , p. 11561-
Keywords
Applied mathematics
Biogeography
Scientific data
Theoretical ecology
Project
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/UKRI//EP%2FI019170%2F1/UK/Resilience and interaction of networks in ecology and economics/RESINEE
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO//CGL2013-48768-P/ES/IDENTIFICANDO SÍNDROMES DE SENSIBILIDAD A LA FRAGMANTACIÓN DE HÁBITATS EN PLANTAS Y AVES HOLÁRTICAS/SINFRAG
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/CAM//S2009%2FAMB-1783/ES/Restauración y conservación de los ecosistemas madrileños: respuesta frente al cambio global/REMEDINAL-2
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MEC//CGL2010-22119/ES/FRAGMENTACIÓN DE BOSQUES EN ESPAÑA Y EUROPA Y PROBABILIDADES DE EXTINCIÓN DE ESPECIES FORESTALES DE ANIMALES Y PLANTAS
Document type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Version
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
© 2015 The Author(s)
Access rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abstract
How species richness relates to environmental gradients at large extents is commonly investigatedaggregating local site data to coarser grains. However, such relationships often change with the grainof analysis, potentially hiding the local signal. Here we show that a novel network technique, the"method of reflections", could unveil the relationships between species richness and climate withoutsuch drawbacks. We introduced a new index related to potential species richness, which revealedlarge scale patterns by including at the local community level information about species distributionthroughout the dataset (i.e., the network). The method effectively removed noise, identifying howfar site richness was from potential. When applying it to study woody species richness patterns inSpain, we observed that annual precipitation and mean annual temperature explained large parts ofthe variance of the newly defined species richness, highlighting that, at the local scale, communitiesin drier and warmer areas were potentially the species richest. Our method went far beyond whatgeographical upscaling of the data could unfold, and the insights obtained strongly suggested that itis a powerful instrument to detect key factors underlying species richness patterns, and that it couldhave numerous applications in ecology and other fields.
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revealing_baudena_SR_2015.pdf | 17.22Mb |
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