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4 - Species distribution patterns, diversity scaling and testing for fractals in southern African birds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
Jack J. Lennon ,
William E. Kunin ,
Stephen Hartley  and
Kevin J. Gaston
Edited by
David Storch ,
Pablo Marquet  and
James Brown
Jack J. Lennon
Affiliation:
The Macaulay Institute Aberdeen
William E. Kunin
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Stephen Hartley
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Kevin J. Gaston
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
David Storch
Affiliation:
Charles University, Prague
Pablo Marquet
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
James Brown
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Summary

Introduction

Describing and ultimately understanding species distribution and biodiversity patterns is undoubtedly one of the major goals in ecology (Gaston, 2000). Spatial scale is an extremely important issue here, and the topic is deservedly now getting more attention than hitherto (for example, Lomolino, 2000; Whittaker, Willis & Field, 2001). There is considerable interest in applying fractal and related cross-scale analytical methods to species distribution patterns, with a view to describing these patterns parsimoniously, connecting cross-scale species incidence with emergent properties such as the species–area relationship (Harte & Kinzig, 1997; Harte, Kinzig & Green, 1999; Plotkin et al., 2000; Harte, Blackburn & Ostling, 2001; Šizling & Storch, 2004; Kunin & Lennon, 2005), predicting abundance at fine scales from coarse scale information (Kunin, 1998; He & Gaston, 2000; Kunin, Hartley & Lennon, 2000; Gaston, 2003), identifying scaling regions and breakpoints (see Hartley et al., 2004) and detecting scale invariance in populations (Keitt et al., 2002). Although the roots of these cross-scale ideas lie partly in more familiar ecological pattern-analysis methods (for a good summary see Dale, 1998; Fortin & Dale, 2005), they offer exciting new ways of describing and thinking about species distribution patterns that may, ultimately, lead to a much better understanding of the ecological processes involved in their generation.

Despite this large and growing body of work, on the whole surprisingly little is known about the scaling properties of species distribution patterns.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scaling Biodiversity , pp. 51 - 76
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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