Climatic niche breadth can explain variation in geographical range size of alpine and subalpine plants

作者：Fangyuan Yu, T.A. Groen, Tiejun Wang, Andrew K. Skidmore, Jihong Huang, Keping Ma · 发表于：International Journal of Geographical Information Systems · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.1080/13658816.2016.1195502 · 被引用次数：60 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Plant and animal studies、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

Understanding the environmental factors determining the distribution of species with different range sizes can provide valuable insights for evolutionary ecology and conservation biology in the face of expected climate change. However, little is known about what determines the variation in geographical and elevational ranges of alpine and subalpine plant species. Here, we examined the relationship between geographical and elevational range sizes for 80 endemic rhododendron species in China using Spearman’s rank-order correlation. We ran the species distribution model – maximum entropy modelling (MaxEnt) – with 27 environmental variables. The importance of each variable to the model prediction was compared for species groups with different geographical and elevational range sizes. Our results showed that the correlation between geographical and elevational range sizes of rhododendron species was not significant. Climate-related variables were found to be the most important factors in shaping the distributional ranges of alpine and subalpine plant species across China. Species with geographically and elevationally narrow ranges had distinct niche requirements. For geographical ranges, the narrow-ranged species showed less tolerance to niche conditions than the wide-ranged species. For elevational ranges, compared with the wide-ranged species, the narrow-ranged species showed an equivalent niche breadth, but occurred at different niche position along the environmental gradient. ...