Vortrag, Macroecology in Space and Time - 10th Annual meeting of the Specialist Group on Macroecology 2017, Vienna, Austria: 19.04.2017 - 21.04.2017
Abstract:
There is a large amount of publications which addresses global patterns of species richness, spatial turnover and speciation. Endemism is often the result of local allopatric speciation (neoendemismus) and shows a heterogeneous pattern on global scale. In literature, climate-change velocity during glacial-interglacial cycles has been identified as one important influencing driver of endemism: Areas which experienced a high climate-change velocity contain a low percentage of endemism because of incomplete niche realization and higher extinction threats. However, climate-change velocity seems to influence endemism, but cannot stimulate the presence of the process itself. Environmental changes associated with small-scaled topographic heterogeneity seem to increase allopatric speciation (topography-driven isolation). Most former studies showed that only for islands or selected mountainous areas. We include a globally usable approach to define isolation based on nearest distances to areas of similar elevations. “Endemism richness” (or “range size rarity”) is already proposed in literature to incorporate endemism and species richness of a defined area. We apply that by inverse range sizes of animal species based on their occurrence in grid cells. We test both, the impact of topography-driven isolation and climate-change velocity on available global faunal distribution data to prove their impact on global endemism richness patterns.