Spatial patterns of species richness in New World coral snakes and the metabolic theory of ecology
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Data
2008-11-05
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Resumo
The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) has attracted great interest because it proposes an
explanation for species diversity gradients based on temperature-metabolism relationships
of organisms. Here we analyse the spatial richness pattern of 73 coral snake species
from the New World in the context of MTE. We first analysed the association between lntransformed
richness and environmental variables, including the inverse transformation
of annual temperature (1/kT ). We used eigenvector-based spatial filtering to remove the
residual spatial autocorrelation in the data and geographically weighted regression to
account for non-stationarity in data. In a model I regression (OLS), the observed slope
between ln-richness and 1/kT was 0.626 (r
2 ¼ 0.413), but a model II regression generated
a much steeper slope (0.975). When we added additional environmental correlates and
the spatial filters in the OLS model, the R2 increased to 0.863 and the partial regression
coefficient of 1/kT was 0.676. The GWR detected highly significant non-stationarity, in
data, and the median of local slopes of ln-richness against 1/kT was 0.38. Our results
expose several problems regarding the assumptions needed to test MTE: although the slope
of OLS fell within that predicted by the theory and the dataset complied with the
assumption of temperature-independence of average body size, the fact that coral snakes
consist of a restricted taxonomic group and the non-stationarity of slopes across
geographical space makes MTE invalid to explain richness in this case. Also, it is clear that
other ecological and historical factors are important drivers of species richness patterns
and must be taken into account both in theoretical modeling and data analysis.
Descrição
v. 35, p. 163-173, 2008
Palavras-chave
Distribution modeling, Latitudinal gradient, Metabolic theory, Spatial autocorrelation, Richness gradients
Citação
TERRIBILE, Levi Carina; DINIZ FILHO, José Alexandre Felizola. Spatial patterns of species richness in New World coral snakes and the metabolic theory of ecology. Acta Oecologica, Montrouge, v. 35, p. 163-173, 2008. Disponível em: <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1146609X08001446>.