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 e...