testing the water–energy theory on american palms (arecaceae) using geographically weighted regression测试水能理论在美国的手掌(棕榈科)使用地理加权回归.pdfVIP

Testing the Water–Energy Theory on American Palms (Arecaceae) Using Geographically Weighted Regression 1 1 1 2 1 Wolf L. Eiserhardt , Stine Bjorholm , Jens-Christian Svenning , Thiago F. Rangel , Henrik Balslev * ´ 1 Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity Group, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, 2 Departamento de Ecologia, ICB, Universidade Federal de Goias, ˆ Goiania, GO, Brazil Abstract Water and energy have emerged as the best contemporary environmental correlates of broad-scale species richness patterns. A corollary hypothesis of water–energy dynamics theory is that the influence of water decreases and the influence of energy increases with absolute latitude. We report the first use of geographically weighted regression for testing this hypothesis on a continuous species richness gradient that is entirely located within the tropics and subtropics. The dataset was divided into northern and southern hemispheric portions to test whether predictor shifts are more pronounced in the less oceanic northern hemisphere. American palms (Arecaceae, n = 547 spp.), whose species richness and distributions are known to respond strongly to water and energy, were used as a model group. The ability of water and energy to explain palm species richness was quantified locally at different spatial scales and regressed on latitude. Clear latitudinal trends in agreement with water–energy dynamics theory were found, but the results did not differ qualitatively between hemispheres. Strong inherent spatial autocorr