Data for: Biodiversity and elevation gradients across worldwide Mountains

Aim: Identifying macroecological patterns and biases in species distribution is a challenging but essential task in biodiversity-oriented studies. Despite the extensive attempts to find consistent species richness elevation (SRE) patterns, the topic remains controversial owing to widespread conflicting, idiosyncratic, and non-generalizable underlying mechanisms. We compiled a database to perform a meta-analytical review to answer why patterns of species-richness in elevation gradients remain elusive, a long-standing, central but contentious macroecological and biogeographical question.

Location: Global elevation gradients.

Taxon: Major terrestrial taxa (invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants).

Methods: We tested the effect of elevation on species richness using multilevel mixed-effects meta-analytical models. Data from 127 studies spawning almost one century of research were integrated to test the effect of elevation across distinct 1) SRE models, 2) quality of primary data (e.g., m..., To perform a systematic quantitative review on SRE patterns we used different approaches, following the synthesis guidelines in Haddaway et al. (2020). First, we conducted literature searches in the Web of Science and Scopus searching engines, using the following keyword combination: (“altitud* gradient*” OR “elevation* gradient*” OR “mountain* gradient*” OR altitud* OR elevation* OR mountain*) AND (“species richness” OR richness OR diversity OR “species diversity\" OR biodiversity). Initial searches were conducted between July 2020 and March 2021 and covered the timespan of the bibliographic databases (1945-2021). To complement our database, we also included studies provided in the reference list of elevational gradients reviews (e.g., Rahbek, 1995; Sanders & Rahbek, 2012; see Figure S1 and Table S1). A total of 644 published studies were fully screened for eligibility. 
From these, we selected all studies that reported data on SRE relationships. This search comprised global data ac...,