Mountain metacommunities: climate and spatial connectivity shape ant diversity in a complex landscape

Understanding what drives biodiversity patterns across scales is the central goal of ecology. Both environmental gradients and spatial landscape structure have been found to be important factors influencing species distributions and community composition, and partly reflect the balance of underlying deterministic and stochastic community processes. In some systems, environmental gradients and spatial connectivity are intertwined in that steep environmental gradients serve as boundaries on species movements and impose environment-derived complex spatial structure to metacommunities. Mountainous landscapes are prime examples of this, and recent theory has linked principles of geomorphology, environmental gradients, and spatial structure to make predictions for resulting community patterns. In this context, we examine variation in taxonomic and phylogenetic ant diversity patterns along a geographic transect spanning >5000 m in elevational range in the Hengduan mountains of southern Chin...解析跨尺度生物多样性格局的驱动机制，是生态学的核心研究目标。环境梯度与空间景观格局均被证实为影响物种分布与群落组成的关键因子，二者在一定程度上反映了底层确定性与随机性群落过程的平衡关系。在部分生态系统中，环境梯度与空间连通性相互交织：陡峭的环境梯度可构成物种迁移的屏障，并为集合群落（metacommunity）赋予由环境塑造的复杂空间结构。山地景观便是这类系统的典型代表，近期的相关理论已整合地貌学原理、环境梯度与空间结构，对由此产生的群落格局作出预测。在此研究背景下，我们针对中国南部横断山脉内一条海拔跨度超5000米的地理样带，分析了蚂蚁的分类多样性与系统发育多样性格样的变化规律。