Biodiversity Institute and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011 May 6;6(5):e19359. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019359.
We explore global spatial diversity patterns for terrestrial mammals using as a tool range-diversity plots. These plots display simultaneously information about the number of species in localities and their spatial covariance in composition. These are highly informative, as we show by linking range-diversity plots with maps and by highlighting the correspondences between well defined regions of the plots with geographical regions or with taxonomic groups. Range-diversity plots are mathematically constrained by the lines of maximum and minimum mean covariance in species composition. We show how regions in the range-diversity plot corresponding to the line of maximum covariance correspond to large continental masses, and regions near the lower limit of the range-diversity plot correspond to archipelagos and mountain ranges. We show how curves of constant covariance correspond to nested faunas. Finally, we show that the observed distribution of the covariance range has significantly longer tails than random, with clear geographic correspondences. At the scale of our data we found that range-diversity plots reveal biodiversity patterns that cannot be replicated by null models, and correspond to conspicuous terrain features and taxonomic groupings.
我们利用分布-多样性图探索了陆地哺乳动物的全球空间多样性模式。这些图同时显示了局部物种数量及其组成的空间协方差信息。我们通过将分布-多样性图与地图联系起来，并通过突出图上定义明确的区域与地理区域或分类群之间的对应关系，展示了这些图的高度信息性。分布-多样性图受到物种组成中最大和最小平均协方差线的数学约束。我们展示了对应于最大协方差线的分布-多样性图中的区域如何对应于大的大陆块，而靠近分布-多样性图下限的区域如何对应于群岛和山脉。我们展示了恒定协方差曲线如何对应嵌套的动物群。最后，我们表明，观察到的协方差范围分布具有明显长于随机分布的长尾，并且具有明显的地理对应关系。在我们数据的规模上，我们发现分布-多样性图揭示了不能被零模型复制的生物多样性模式，并且与显著的地形特征和分类群对应。
