Marco Barandun

Anyone else working on #vegetation #resurveys on managed #grasslands in the #Alps? 🌱 happy to connect!
#biodiversity

Global patterns in plant environmental breadths The latitudinal gradient in plant diversity is one of the most famous patterns in ecology. It is hypothesised that narrow niche breadths and restricted geographic ranges in the tropics allow more spe...

10/ 🚀 Check out our full study here: doi.org/10.1111/ecog... #ecology #biogeography #biodiversity

Thanks to @andreapaz.bsky.social and Dan for the great support!

9/ 🌍 Understanding these complexities helps refine global biodiversity research & conservation, ensuring we don’t overlook the ecological richness of tropical and Southern ecosystems.

8/ 📖 Our findings highlight a gap in research focus—tropical & Southern Hemisphere ecosystems are underrepresented in historical studies. This has major implications for biogeography & conservation strategies.

7/ 🔬 Our results suggest that single-hemisphere studies may have overemphasized or underestimated these patterns. The long-standing support for Rapoport’s rule in the Northern Hemisphere may partly reflect historical sampling biases.

6/ 🌎 In fact, we found limited evidence for a global latitudinal gradient in latitudinal ranges size or environmental breadth. The patterns we see are shaped more by geography & evolutionary history than simple niche constraints.

5/ 🔍 Even though range size and environmental breadth were strongly correlated, we did not find a consistent relationship between latitude and environmental breadth.

4/ 🌿 However, for non-tree species in the Southern Hemisphere, we found the opposite: their latitudinal ranges actually decreased towards the poles—challenging the idea of a simple global trend.

3/ 📊 We found only weak support for Rapoport’s rule in the Northern Hemisphere, and mostly for trees—their latitudinal ranges did tend to increase towards the poles.

2/ 🌍 If Rapoport’s rule holds, species in the tropics should have smaller latitudinal ranges than those in higher latitudes. But does this pattern hold globally?

1/ 🎉 I’m excited to share the paper from my master’s thesis! 🌱 We compiled a large global dataset to test if plants have narrower latitudinal ranges & environmental breadth in the tropics compared to boreal regions. #RapoportsRule