Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Vogelwarte Radolfzell, Schlossallee, Germany.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Sep 12;366(1577):2536-44. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0024.
Documenting and exploring the patterns of diversity of life on Earth has always been a central theme in biology. Species richness despite being the most commonly used measure of diversity in macroecological studies suffers from not considering the evolutionary and ecological differences among species. Phylogenetic diversity (PD) and functional diversity (FD) have been proposed as alternative measures to overcome this limitation. Although species richness, PD and FD are closely related, their relationships have never been investigated on a global scale. Comparing PD and FD with species richness corroborated the general assumptions of surrogacy of the different diversity measures. However, the analysis of the residual variance suggested that the mismatches between the diversity measures are influenced by environmental conditions. PD increased relative to species richness with increasing mean annual temperature, whereas FD decreased with decreasing seasonality relative to PD. We also show that the tropical areas are characterized by a FD deficit, a phenomenon, that suggests that in tropical areas more species can be packed into the ecological space. We discuss potential mechanisms that could have resulted in the gradient of spatial mismatch observed in the different biodiversity measures and draw parallels to local scale studies. We conclude that the use of multiple diversity measures on a global scale can help to elucidate the relative importance of historical and ecological processes shaping the present gradients in mammalian diversity.
记录和探索地球上生命多样性的模式一直是生物学的核心主题。物种丰富度尽管是宏观生态学研究中最常用的多样性衡量标准，但它没有考虑到物种之间的进化和生态差异。系统发育多样性 (PD) 和功能多样性 (FD) 已被提议作为克服这一限制的替代措施。尽管物种丰富度、PD 和 FD 密切相关，但它们之间的关系从未在全球范围内进行过研究。将 PD 和 FD 与物种丰富度进行比较证实了不同多样性衡量标准的替代关系的一般假设。然而，残差方差的分析表明，多样性衡量标准之间的不匹配受到环境条件的影响。PD 随着年平均温度的升高而相对于物种丰富度增加，而 FD 随着相对于 PD 的季节性降低而降低。我们还表明，热带地区的 FD 不足，这表明在热带地区，更多的物种可以被填充到生态空间中。我们讨论了可能导致不同生物多样性衡量标准中观察到的空间不匹配梯度的潜在机制，并与局部尺度研究进行了类比。我们得出结论，在全球范围内使用多种多样性衡量标准可以帮助阐明塑造哺乳动物多样性当前梯度的历史和生态过程的相对重要性。
