10.5061/DRYAD.VX0K6DJMR
Arenas-Navarro, Maribel
0000-0003-3540-8041
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Téllez-Valdés, Oswaldo
National Autonomous University of Mexico
López-Segoviano, Gabriel
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Murguía-Romero, Miguel
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Tello, Sebastián
Missouri Botanical Garden
Environmental correlates of Leguminosae species richness in Mexico:
quantifying the contributions of energy and environmental seasonality
Dryad
dataset
2019
2019-11-11T00:00:00Z
2019-11-11T00:00:00Z
en
1054721 bytes
3
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Explaining species richness patterns is a central issue in ecology, but a
general explanation remain elusive. Environmental conditions have been
proposed to be important drivers of these patterns, but we still need to
better understand the relative contribution of environmental factors. Here
we aim at testing two environmental hypotheses for richness gradients:
energy availability and environmental seasonality using diversity patterns
of the family Leguminosae across Mexico. We compiled a database of 502
species and 32,962 records. After dividing Mexico into 100x100 km grid
cells, we constructed a map of variation in species richness that accounts
for heterogeneity in sampling effort. We found, the cells with the highest
species richness of legumes are in the Neotropical region of Pacific
coastal and southern Mexico, where the legume family dominates the
tropical rain forests and seasonally dry tropical forests. Regression
models show that energy and seasonality predictors can explain 25% and 49%
of the variation in richness, respectively. Spatial autocorrelation
analysis showed that richness has a strong spatial structure, but that
most of this structure disappears when both energy and seasonality are
used to account for richness gradient. Our study demonstrates multiple
environmental conditions contribute complementarily to explain diversity
gradients. Moreover, it shows that in some regions, environmental
seasonality can be more important than energy availability, contradicting
studies at coarser spatial scales. More basic taxonomic and floristic work
is needed to help describe patterns of diversity for many groups to allow
for testing the underlying mechanisms responsible for diversity gradients.