RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Climatic stability and resource availability explains dung beetles (Scarabaeinae) richness patternon the Americas
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 402537
DO 10.1101/402537
A1 Anderson Matos Medina
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/05/402537.abstract
AB Climatic conditions are the main driver of species richness. Specifically, the increase in climatic instability may reduce species richness directly and indirectly by reducing resources available. This hypothesis is evaluated here using a producer-consumer interaction to explain dung beetle richness on a continental scale (America) using mammal richness as resource proxy and temperature and precipitation seasonality as a proxy for climatic instability. A spatial path analysis was built in order to evaluate this hypothesis while controlling for spatial autocorrelation and differences in the sampling effort and abundance of each study (n=115) gathered from the literature. Dung beetle richness was directly explained by temperature seasonality, precipitation seasonality, and mammal richness, whereas only precipitation seasonality had an effect modulated by mammal richness. This result reinforces the notion that species richness can be explained by climatic conditions, but also reveals the importance of biotic interactions in order to understand the mechanisms behind such patterns.