The Conditioned Environmental Center‐Periphery Hypothesis of Biogeography: Statistical Evidence From Tree Species
Pablo Antúnez, Martin Ricker
TL;DR
This paper challenges the traditional idea that species are most common at the center of their environmental range by showing that natural limits often cause asymmetry in species distributions.
Contribution
A new conditioned environmental center-periphery hypothesis is proposed, accounting for natural truncations in environmental gradients.
Findings
Only 12% of species-environment combinations showed highest probability intervals including the midpoint of the gradient.
Environmental truncations, like non-negative precipitation, often prevent symmetric expansion of species ranges.
The classical center-periphery hypothesis is invalid in 55% of cases due to these truncations.
Abstract
It has been discussed for decades whether species occur most frequently at their geographic center, and more recently at their environmental niches' center. The aim here is to analyze for each environmental gradient separately the ecological niche of 12 Mexican tree species and 16 abiotic environmental gradients, in the form of statistical probability density functions. Is a symmetrically positioned center always possible by searching for additional data? For each species‐variable combination, the occurrences along an environmental gradient were grouped in histograms. Logistic regression was used to fit a polynomial equation, whose degree depended on the number of significantly different bins. A highest‐probability interval on the gradient was determined, where 25% of the individuals were found with the highest probability. The relative distance from the center (midpoint) of the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEcology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies · Species Distribution and Climate Change · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation