Abstract
Climate is widely recognised as an important determinant of the latitudinal diversity gradient. However, most existing studies make no distinction between direct and indirect effects of climate, which substantially hinders our understanding of how climate constrains biodiversity globally. Using data from 35 large forest plots, we test hypothesised relationships amongst climate, topography, forest structural attributes (stem abundance, tree size variation and stand basal area) and tree species richness to better understand drivers of latitudinal tree diversity patterns. Climate influences tree richness both directly, with more species in warm, moist, aseasonal climates and indirectly, with more species at higher stem abundance. These results imply direct limitation of species diversity by climatic stress and more rapid (co-)evolution and narrower niche partitioning in warm climates. They also support the idea that increased numbers of individuals associated with high primary productivity are partitioned to support a greater number of species.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 245-255 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Ecology letters |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Margie Mayfield, three anonymous reviewers and Jacob Weiner for constructive comments on the manuscript. This study was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0506101), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31622014 and 31570426), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (17l-gzd24) to CC. XW was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB31030000). The study was also supported by the Czech Science Foundation (15-23242S to KK and TV, and 16-26369S to DS). Yves Rosseel provided us valuable suggestions on using the lavaan package conducting SEM analyses. Funding and citation information for each forest plot is available in the Text S1.
Funding Information:
We thank Margie Mayfield, three anonymous reviewers and Jacob Weiner for constructive comments on the manuscript. This study was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0506100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31622014 and 31570426), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (17lgzd24) to CC. XW was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB31030000). The study was also supported by the Czech Science Foundation (15-23242S to KK and TV, and 16-26369S to DS). Yves Rosseel provided us valuable suggestions on using the lavaan package conducting SEM analyses. Funding and citation information for each forest plot is available in the Text S1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS
Keywords
- CTFS-ForestGEO
- Climate tolerance hypothesis
- latitudinal diversity gradient
- more-individuals hypothesis
- species-energy relationship
- structural equation modelling