Abstract
Environmental heterogeneity–species richness relationships from a global perspective
Highlights
Introduction and MethodsSpatial environmental heterogeneity (EH) has fascinated researchers from ecology, biogeography, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology for decades, and is considered one of the most important factors determining species richness (Tews et al 2004, Field et al 2009)
I revealed how heterogeneous and ambiguous the quantification and terminology of EH have been in past research: I identified 165 different EH measures, with even more measure variants, related to biotic EH in land cover and vegetation, and abiotic EH in climate, soil and topography
An important finding was that spatial grain, spatial extent and the use of equal-area study units clearly influenced the strength of EH– richness relationships, at least for the data subset including measures related to land cover types and elevation
Summary
Introduction and MethodsSpatial environmental heterogeneity (EH) has fascinated researchers from ecology, biogeography, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology for decades, and is considered one of the most important factors determining species richness (Tews et al 2004, Field et al 2009). EH has been quantified with regard to vegetation structure, plant diversity, topographical complexity and habitat diversity, and with many different measures based on indices, ranges and other calculation methods. The variability in EH–richness research hampers attempts to find and compare studies and limits our understanding of the general EH– richness relationship.
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