Barandun, Marco;
Paz, Andrea;
van Tiel, Nina;
van den Hoogen, Johan;
Pellissier, Loic;
Crowther, Thomas W;
Maynard, Daniel S;
(2025)
Global patterns in plant environmental breadths.
Ecography
, Article e07637. 10.1111/ecog.07637.
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Abstract
The latitudinal gradient in plant diversity is one of the most famous patterns in ecology. It is hypothesised that narrow niche breadths and restricted geographic ranges in the tropics allow more species to coexist with minimal overlap relative to high-latitude regions. Although a wealth of studies have investigated these questions across different regions and taxonomic groups, these have consistently yielded contradictory results, leading to the continued persistence of numerous ecological explanations. Here, using a global occurrence database containing over 100 000 plant species, we provide the first globally standardised investigation into the geographic relationships among latitudinal range, environmental breadth, and latitudinal median. We find limited evidence for a global latitudinal gradient in species' ranges and environmental breadths, with results varying between hemispheres and along latitude within each hemisphere. In agreement with previous observations, we show consistent support for a latitudinal gradient in environmental breadth and latitudinal range, but only for trees in the Northern Hemisphere and for tropical species. In the Southern Hemisphere, conversely, these trends are inverted for non-tropical species, with latitudinal range and environmental breadth decreasing with distance from the equator. Moreover, these relationships are even weaker with environmental breadth, even though there is a strong relationship between environmental breadth and latitudinal range. By applying standardised methods at the global scale, these results suggest that variation in species' ranges is largely a by-product of biogeographic patterns rather than niche processes. Collectively, this work illustrates that existing ecological ‘rules' linking niche breadth to latitude predominantly reflect regional sampling biases and a historical focus on the Northern Hemisphere and certain taxonomic groups.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Global patterns in plant environmental breadths |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/ecog.07637 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07637 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Authors. Ecography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | biogeography, ecological niche, macroecology, range size, Rapoport’s rule |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207180 |
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