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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Predictors of extinction risk of passerine birds in a Central European country
TL;DR: It is found that, after controlling for variation in breeding distribution, slow life history increases the extinction risk in habitat specialist species, but reduces such risk in habitats generalists, and that current conservation effort, especially in warmer zones, may not sufficiently address the requirements of the habitat specialists with slow histories.
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Phylogeny Predicts Future Habitat Shifts Due to Climate Change
Matjaž Kuntner,Matjaž Kuntner,Matjaž Kuntner,Magdalena Naparus,Daiqin Li,Jonathan A. Coddington +5 more
TL;DR: Phylogeny better predicts the species current ecological preferences than do lifestyles, and models incorporating phylogenetic relatedness are an important additional tool to predict accurately biotic responses to global change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Traits of a lineage with extraordinary geographical range: ecology, behavior and life-history of the sailfin tetra Crenuchus spilurus
TL;DR: It is proposed that ecology along with sexual selection may interplay and contribute to the inter-population morphological similarity, criterion on which Crenuchus is considered a monotypic genus.
Journal ArticleDOI
Urbanization increases biotic homogenization of zooplankton communities in tropical reservoirs
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors investigated twenty-five permanent reservoirs over three hydrological seasons in a well-developed and rapidly expanding city in tropical China and found that the structure of zooplankton communities were strongly homogenized in the studied urban reservoirs as being reflected in the low beta-diversity between the two location classes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Phenotypic plasticity is a negative, though weak, predictor of the commonness of 105 grassland species
TL;DR: The results do not indicate that larger phenotypic plasticity of leaf morphological traits enhances species abundance, and possession of a particular trait value, rather than of trait plasticity, is a more important determinant of species commonness.
References
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Bias in meta-analysis detected by a simple, graphical test
TL;DR: Funnel plots, plots of the trials' effect estimates against sample size, are skewed and asymmetrical in the presence of publication bias and other biases Funnel plot asymmetry, measured by regression analysis, predicts discordance of results when meta-analyses are compared with single large trials.
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Conducting Meta-Analyses in R with the metafor Package
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