Abundance data on European plants (2.5-min raster size)

Aim:
Macroecology and species distribution modelling often assume links between
fine-grain (local) abundance and coarse-grain geographic distribution and/or
climatic niche. However, we lack empirical knowledge of how spatial patterns of
local abundance are related to coarse-grain distribution. Here we investigate
this cross-scale transferability assumption by testing for three
macroecological relationships: (1) the abundance-range-size relationship, (2)
the abundance-centre-relationship, and (3) the abundance-suitability relationship.

Location: Europe

Taxon: Vascular
plants

Methods: Distribution
range maps of 517 vascular plant species from the Chorological Database Halle
were used to capture Europe-wide geographic ranges and derive climatic niches
of these species. We used data from 744,513 vegetation plots from the European
Vegetation Archive where local species abundance was measured as plant cover
per plot. Centrality was calculated per species for each plot in geographic and
climatic space. Climatic suitability at plot locations was predicted from
coarse-grain species distribution models (SDMs). The general relationship
between centrality and climatic suitability with abundance was tested with
linear models. Quantile regression was used to examine the relationships of
centrality and climatic suitability to upper limits of abundance. We summarized
the overall trend across species slopes from linear models and quantile
regression using a meta-analytical approach.

Results: We
did not find support for a positive relationship between mean local abundance
and coarse-grain range or niche size. Significant positive correlations of
abundance with centrality and climatic suitability in both the geographic and
climatic space were as common as significant correlations in the opposite
direction.

Main conclusions: Finding no unequivocal support for any of the tested
relationships, our results show that coarse-grain distribution properties might
be of limited use for predicting local abundance. We conclude that environmental
factors influencing individual performance measured as local cover-abundance
likely differ from drivers of coarse-grain occurrence patterns. Current SDM approaches
seem to be not directly transferable to local plant species abundance and
performance.
The here provided excel-file contains all information to reproduce the results. Detailed description on the data is given in the metadata.