Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2017 Dec;20(12):1526-1533. doi: 10.1111/ele.12860. Epub 2017 Oct 12.
The pervasive idea that species should be most abundant in the centre of their geographic range or centre of their climatic niche is a key assumption in many existing ecological hypotheses and has been declared a general macroecological rule. However, empirical support for decreasing population abundance with increasing distance from geographic range or climatic niche centre (distance-abundance relationships) remains fairly weak. We examine over 1400 bird, mammal, fish and tree species to provide a thorough test of distance-abundance relationships, and their associations with species traits and phylogenetic relationships. We failed to detect consistent distance-abundance relationships, and found no association between distance-abundance slope and species traits or phylogenetic relatedness. Together, our analyses suggest that distance-abundance relationships may be rare, difficult to detect, or are an oversimplification of the complex biogeographical forces that determine species spatial abundance patterns.
普遍认为，物种在其地理分布范围的中心或气候生态位的中心应该最为丰富，这是许多现有生态假设的关键假设，并已被宣布为一般的宏观生态学规则。然而，随着与地理分布范围或气候生态位中心的距离增加，种群丰度减少的经验证据仍然相当薄弱。我们研究了超过 1400 种鸟类、哺乳动物、鱼类和树种，以对距离-丰度关系及其与物种特征和系统发育关系的关联进行全面检验。我们未能检测到一致的距离-丰度关系，也没有发现距离-丰度斜率与物种特征或系统发育相关性之间存在关联。总的来说，我们的分析表明，距离-丰度关系可能很少见，难以检测，或者是对决定物种空间丰度模式的复杂生物地理因素的过于简单化。
