Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e25440. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025440. Epub 2011 Sep 27.
Relationships between species composition and its environmental determinants are a basic objective of ecology. Such relationships are scale dependent, and predictors of species composition typically include variables such as climate, topographic, historical legacies, land uses, human population levels, and random processes. Our objective was to quantify the effect of environmental determinants on U.S. mammal composition at various spatial scales. We found that climate was the predominant factor affecting species composition, and its relative impact increased in correlation with the increase of the spatial scale. Another factor affecting species composition is land-use-land-cover. Our findings showed that its impact decreased as the spatial scale increased. We provide quantitative indication of highly significant effect of climate and land-use-land-cover variables on mammal composition at multiple scales.
物种组成与其环境决定因素之间的关系是生态学的一个基本目标。这种关系具有尺度依赖性，物种组成的预测因子通常包括气候、地形、历史遗留、土地利用、人口水平和随机过程等变量。我们的目的是量化环境决定因素对美国哺乳动物组成在不同空间尺度上的影响。我们发现气候是影响物种组成的主要因素，其相对影响随着空间尺度的增加而增加。另一个影响物种组成的因素是土地利用/土地覆盖。我们的研究结果表明，随着空间尺度的增加，其影响减小。我们提供了定量指标，表明气候和土地利用/土地覆盖变量对多种尺度上哺乳动物组成的影响非常显著。
