Abundance data on European plants (2.5-min raster size)

Aim: Macroecology and species distribution modelling often assume links between fine-grain (local) abundance and coarse-grain geographic distribution and/or climatic niche. However, we lack empirical knowledge of how spatial patterns of local abundance are related to coarse-grain distribution. Here we investigate this cross-scale transferability assumption by testing for three macroecological relationships: (1) the abundance-range-size relationship, (2) the abundance-centre-relationship, and (3) the abundance-suitability relationship. Location: Europe Taxon: Vascular plants Methods: Distribution range maps of 517 vascular plant species from the Chorological Database Halle were used to capture Europe-wide geographic ranges and derive climatic niches of these species. We used data from 744,513 vegetation plots from the European Vegetation Archive where local species abundance was measured as plant cover per plot. Centrality was calculated per species for each plot in geographic and climatic space. Climatic suitability at plot locations was predicted from coarse-grain species distribution models (SDMs). The general relationship between centrality and climatic suitability with abundance was tested with linear models. Quantile regression was used to examine the relationships of centrality and climatic suitability to upper limits of abundance. We summarized the overall trend across species slopes from linear models and quantile regression using a meta-analytical approach. Results: We did not find support for a positive relationship between mean local abundance and coarse-grain range or niche size. Significant positive correlations of abundance with centrality and climatic suitability in both the geographic and climatic space were as common as significant correlations in the opposite direction. Main conclusions: Finding no unequivocal support for any of the tested relationships, our results show that coarse-grain distribution properties might be of limited use for predicting local abundance. We conclude that environmental factors influencing individual performance measured as local cover-abundance likely differ from drivers of coarse-grain occurrence patterns. Current SDM approaches seem to be not directly transferable to local plant species abundance and performance.The here provided excel-file contains all information to reproduce the results. Detailed description on the data is given in the metadata.