Saturation is the idea that a community is effectively filled with species, such that no more can be added without extinctions. This concept has important implications for many areas of ecology, such as species richness, community assembly, invasive species and climate change. Here, we illustrate how biogeography can be used to test for community saturation, when combined with data on local spe...

We tested the hypothesis of a negative relationship between vegetation characteristics and ant species richness in a Brazilian open vegetation habitat, called candeial. We set up arboreal pitfalls to sample arboreal ants and measured the following environmental variables, which were used as surrogate of environmental heterogeneity: tree richness, tree density, tree height, circumference at the ...

Many biological theories have been proposed to explain latitudinal and elevational gradients of species richness, but only recently have theories been proposed that suggest that these patterns may be due solely to geographic constraints. These null models predict mid-domain peaks in species richness as a consequence of geometric patterns resulting from overlapping species ranges between 2 geogr...

Although two thirds of the world’s euphausiid species occur in the Indian Ocean, environmental factors influencing patterns in their diversity across this atypical ocean basin are poorly known. Distribution data for 56 species of euphausiids were extracted from existing literature and, using a geographic information system, spatially-explicit layers of species richness and average taxonomic dis...

In this paper we explore relationships between bird species richness and environmental factors in New York State, focusing particularly on how spatial scale, autocorrelation and nonstationarity affect these relationships. We used spatial statistics, Getis-Ord Gi*(d), to investigate how spatial scale affects the measurement of richness “hot-spots” and “cold-spots” (clusters of high and low speci...

The influence of latitude, substrate type, tidal level, and host shell size on trematode species-richness and prevalence were assessed using published data on 255 samples from 54 species of marine intertidal gastropods. The analyses were performed at different levels of statistical independence: among all samples, across snail species, and using phylogenetically independent contrasts. Repeatabi...

We conducted the first systematic inventory of ant species richness in pitcher-plant bogs of Massachusetts. Twenty-six species were collected in 18 bogs during 1999 and 2000. We collected the bog-specialist Myrmica lobifrons for the first time in Massachusetts and found that it occurred in bogs from the Berkshire Mountains to Nantucket. Ant species composition in bogs displayed a nested subsets...

Previous studies have concluded that southern ocean islands are anomalous because past glacial extent and current temperature apparently explain most variance in their species richness. Here, the relationships between physical variables and species richness of vascular plants, insects, land and seabirds, and mammals were reexamined for these islands. Indigenous and introduced species were disti...

Biologists have long searched for mechanisms responsible for the increase in species richness with decreasing latitude. The strong correlation between species richness and climate is frequently interpreted as reflecting a causal link via processes linked to energy or evolutionary rates. Here, we investigate how the aggregation of clades, as dictated by phylogeny, can give rise to significant cl...

Atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition has been shown to decrease plant species richness along regional deposition gradients in Europe and in experimental manipulations. However, the general response of species richness to N deposition across different vegetation types, soil conditions, and climates remains largely unknown even though responses may be contingent on these environmental factors. We ...