Climatic predictors of species distributions neglect biophysiologically meaningful variables

Climate, soil or both? Which variables are better predictors of the distributions of Australian shrub species?

BACKGROUND Shrubs play a key role in biogeochemical cycles, prevent soil and water erosion, provide forage for livestock, and are a source of food, wood and non-wood products. However, despite their ecological and societal importance, the influence of different environmental variables on shrub distributions remains unclear. We evaluated the influence of climate and soil characteristics, and whe...

Predicting species distributions: use of climatic parameters in BIOCLIM and its impact on predictions of species’ current and future distributions

Bioclimatic models are widely used tools for assessing potential responses of species to climate change. One commonly used model is BIOCLIM, which summarises up to 35 climatic parameters throughout a species’ known range, and assesses the climatic suitability of habitat under current and future climate scenarios. A criticism of BIOCLIM is that the use of all 35 parameters may lead to over-fitti...

Ordered Random Variables from Discontinuous Distributions

In the absolutely continuous case, order statistics, record values and several other models of ordered random variables can be viewed as special cases of generalized order statistics, which enables a unified treatment of their theory. This paper deals with discontinuous generalized order statistics, continuing on the recent work of Tran (2006). Specifically, we show that in general neither re...

Meaningful Learning and Retention: Intrapersonal Cognitive Variables

Spatial variation in the climatic predictors of species compositional turnover and endemism

Previous research focusing on broad-scale or geographically invariant species-environment dependencies suggest that temperature-related variables explain more of the variation in reptile distributions than precipitation. However, species-environment relationships may exhibit considerable spatial variation contingent upon the geographic nuances that vary between locations. Broad-scale, geographi...