Journal ArticleDOI
Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern.
TLDR
Despite significant variability in the strength of the relationship among studies, the general positive relationship suggests that specialist species might be disproportionately vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change due to synergistic effects of a narrow niche and small range size.Abstract:
The range of resources that a species uses (i.e. its niche breadth) might determine the geographical area it can occupy, but consensus on whether a niche breadth–range size relationship generally exists among species has been slow to emerge. The validity of this hypothesis is a key question in ecology in that it proposes a mechanism for commonness and rarity, and if true, may help predict species' vulnerability to extinction. We identified 64 studies that measured niche breadth and range size, and we used a meta-analytic approach to test for the presence of a niche breadth–range size relationship. We found a significant positive relationship between range size and environmental tolerance breadth (z = 0.49), habitat breadth (z = 0.45), and diet breadth (z = 0.28). The overall positive effect persisted even when incorporating sampling effects. Despite significant variability in the strength of the relationship among studies, the general positive relationship suggests that specialist species might be disproportionately vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change due to synergistic effects of a narrow niche and small range size. An understanding of the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that drive and cause deviations from this niche breadth–range size pattern is an important future research goal.read more
Citations
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Plant Species’ Capacity for Range Shifts at the Habitat and Geographic Scales: A Trade-Off-Based Framework
TL;DR: In this article , a trade-off-based framework was proposed to predict whether plant species may undergo range shifts, based on ecological strategies defined by functional trait variation, which can provide a conceptual basis for species distribution models that are generalizable across plant species.
Journal ArticleDOI
Scale-sensitivity in the measurement and interpretation of environmental niches.
Muyang Lu,Walter Jetz +1 more
TL;DR: This article found that the spatial grain of niche measurement is usually uninformed by ecological processes and varies by orders of magnitude, and illustrate the consequences of this variation for the volume, position, and shape of niche estimates, and discuss how it interacts with geographic range size, habitat specialization and environmental heterogeneity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Disentangling the drivers of continental mammalian endemism
TL;DR: In this article , the authors reconstruct trends in mammalian endemism and describe the isolated and combined effects of physiographic, ecological, and evolutionary factors on endemistic behavior of mammalian species.
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Assessing the Synergistic Effects of Land Use and Climate Change on Terrestrial Biodiversity: Are Generalists Always the Winners?
Colin Sweeney,Marta A. Jarzyna +1 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Biogeographic deconstruction of phylogenetic and functional diversity provides insights into the formation of regional assemblages
Rafael Molina-Venegas,Gianluigi Ottaviani,Giandiego Campetella,Roberto Canullo,Stefano Chelli +4 more
TL;DR: In this paper , a biogeographic deconstruction approach of phylogenetic and functional diversity (FD) patterns may help in identifying eco-evolutionary signals in extant regional assemblages.
References
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