Environmental Effects on Vertebrate Species Richness: Testing the Energy, Environmental Stability and Habitat Heterogeneity Hypotheses

BACKGROUND: Explaining species richness patterns is a central issue in biogeography and macroecology. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mechanisms driving biodiversity patterns, but the causes of species richness gradients remain unclear. In this study, we aimed to explain the impacts of energy, environmental stability, and habitat heterogeneity factors on variation of vertebrate species richness (VSR), based on the VSR pattern in China, so as to test the energy hypothesis, the environmental stability hypothesis, and the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A dataset was compiled containing the distributions of 2,665 vertebrate species and eleven ecogeographic predictive variables in China. We grouped these variables into categories of energy, environmental stability, and habitat heterogeneity and transformed the data into 100×100 km quadrat systems. To test the three hypotheses, AIC-based model selection was carried out between VSR and the variables in each group and correlation analyses were conducted. There was a decreasing VSR gradient from the southeast to the northwest of China. Our results showed that energy explained 67.6% of the VSR variation, with the annual mean temperature as the main factor, which was followed by annual precipitation and NDVI. Environmental stability factors explained 69.1% of the VSR variation and both temperature annual range and precipitation seasonality had important contributions. By contrast, habitat heterogeneity variables explained only 26.3% of the VSR variation. Significantly positive correlations were detected among VSR, annual mean temperature, annual precipitation, and NDVI, whereas the relationship of VSR and temperature annual range was strongly negative. In addition, other variables showed moderate or ambiguous relations to VSR. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The energy hypothesis and the environmental stability hypothesis were supported, whereas little support was found for the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis.