Data from: Testing macroecological abundance patterns: the relationship between local abundance and range size, range position and climatic suitability among European vascular plants

Aim: A fundamental question in macroecology centres around understanding
the relationship between species’ local abundance and their distribution
in geographic and climatic space (i.e. the multi-dimensional climatic
space or climatic niche). Here, we tested three macroecological hypotheses
that link local abundance to the following range properties: (1) the
abundance-range size relationship, (2) the abundance-range centre
relationship, and (3) the abundance-suitability relationship. Location:
Europe Taxon: Vascular plants Methods: Distribution range maps were
extracted from the Chorological Database to derive information on the
range and niche sizes of 517 European vascular plant species. To estimate
local abundance, we assessed samples from 744,513 vegetation plots in the
European Vegetation Archive, where local species’ abundance is available
as plant cover per plot. We then calculated the ‘centrality’, i.e. the
distance between the location of the abundance observation and each
species’ range centre in geographic and climatic space. The climatic
suitability of plot locations was estimated using coarse-grain species
distribution models (SDMs). The relationships between centrality or
climatic suitability with abundance were tested using linear models and
quantile regression. We summarized the overall trend across species’
regression slopes from linear models and quantile regression using a
meta-analytical approach. Results: We did not detect any positive
relationships between a species’ mean local abundance and the size of its
geographic range or climatic niche. Contrasting yet significant
correlations were detected between abundance and centrality or climatic
suitability among species. Main conclusions: Our results do not provide
unequivocal support for any of the relationships tested, demonstrating
that determining properties of species’ distributions at large grains and
extents might be of limited use for predicting local abundance, including
current SDM approaches. We conclude that environmental factors influencing
individual performance and local abundance are likely to differ from those
factors driving plant species’ distribution at coarse resolution and broad
geographic extents.