Predicting species abundance by implementing the ecological niche theory

Species are not uniformly distributed across the landscape. For every species, there should be few favoured sites where abundance is high and many other sites of lower suitability where abundance is low. Consequently, local abundance could be thought of as a natural expression of species response to local conditions. The correlation between abundance and environmental suitability has been well documented, and a recent meta-analysis has suggested that this relationship could be a generality. Despite the importance and potential implication of the abundance-suitability relationship, its predictive power for meaningful extrapolations has been surprisingly poorly explored. In this study, we showed how a highly predictable trend can be extracted from the abundance-suitability relationship, accurately predicting the variation in species abundance at a high spatial resolution. We produced high-quality environmental suitability estimations for 50 endemic species to the Australian Wet Tropics. E...