Bird and mammal species composition in distinct geographic regions and their relationships with environmental factors across multiple spatial scales

Global patters of species distributions and their underlying mechanisms are a major question in ecology, and the need for multi-scale analyses has been recognized. Previous studies recognized climate, topography, habitat heterogeneity and disturbance as important variables affecting such patterns. Here we report on analyses of species composition – environment relationships among different taxonomic groups in two continents, and the components of such relationships, in the contiguous USA and Australia. We used partial Canonical Correspondence Analysis of occurrence records of mammals and breeding birds from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, to quantify relationships between species composition and environmental variables in remote geographic regions at multiple spatial scales, with extents ranging from 10(5) to 10(7) km(2) and sampling grids from 10 to 10,000 km(2). We evaluated the concept that two elements contribute to the impact of environmental variables on composition: the strength of species' affinity to an environmental variable, and the amount of variance in the variable. To disentangle these two elements, we analyzed correlations between resulting trends and the amount of variance contained in different environmental variables to isolate the mechanisms behind the observed relationships. We found that climate and land use-land cover are responsible for most explained variance in species composition, regardless of scale, taxonomic group and geographic region. However, the amount of variance in species composition attributed to land use / land cover (LULC) was closely related to the amount of intrinsic variability in LULC in the USA, but not in Australia, while the effect of climate on species composition was negatively correlated to the variability found in the climatic variables. The low variance in climate, compared to LULC, suggests that species in both taxonomic groups have strong affinity to climate, thus it has a strong effect on species distribution and community composition, while the opposite is true for LULC.