Distribution Patterns And Driving Forces Analysis Of Several Typical Vertebrate Species Richness In Mainland China

Understanding what shapes species diversity at broad spatial scales is a central goal of macroecology and biogeography. Despite exhaustive research efforts during the past two centuries, this puzzle still remains unraveled. Although the influences of landscape attributes on species richness have been well documented at landscape scales, their strengths remain little understood at macroecological scales. We aim to assess the role of landscape attributes, in particular, the relative importance of landscape attributes vs. climate, habitat heterogeneity and human activities (CHH) in shaping broad-scale richness patterns.This study was carried out in mainland China, Eastern Asia. The species richness data of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians were derived from the China Species Information Service. Together with the richness data, the CHH variables, and the class-and landscape-level landscape metrics, were calculated at the grain sizes of 50x50,100×100 and 200x200 km2. At these multiple scales, species richness of each taxonomic groups was correlated with the CHH and landscape variables using ordinary least square (OLS) and simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) models; and variation partitioning was used to assess the relative strengths of landscape attributes vs. the CHH variables.In general, climate is the most influential factor shaping the richness patterns. Landscape attributes, especially class-level attributes, can also explain considerable richness variations. Variation partitioning showed largely overlapped fractions of explained variations between landscape attributes and the CHH variables. The pure explanatory power of landscape attributes was little for mammals, reptiles and amphibians, while was considerably large for birds. The environment-richness correlations showed scale-dependency, but the pure explanatory power of landscape attributes appeared to have small changes across the scale range of study. Landscape attributes can act as a useful complementary explanation of broad-scale richness patterns, especially for birds. Incorporating landscape attributes will be of merit for disentangling the drivers of richness patterns and modeling species richness at macroecological scales.