Climate vs. topography – spatial patterns of plant species diversity and endemism on a high-elevation island

1. Climate and topography are among the most fundamental drivers of plant diversity. Here, we assess the importance of climate and topography in explaining diversity patterns of species richness, endemic richness and endemicity on the landscape scale of an oceanic island, and evaluate the independent contribution of climatic and topographic variables to spatial diversity patterns. 2. We constructed a presence/absence matrix of perennial endemic and native vascular plant species (including subspecies) in 890 plots on the environmentally very heterogeneous island of La Palma, Canary Islands. Species richness, endemic richness and endemicity were recorded, interpolated and related to climate (i.e. variables describing temperature, precipitation, variability and climatic rarity) and topography (i.e. topographic complexity, solar radiation, geologic age, slope and aspect). We used multi-model inference, spatial autoregressive models, variance partitioning and linear regression kriging as sta...