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Updated: May 17, 2026

Modeling the Size Spectrum for Macroinvertebrates and Fishes in Stream Ecosystems
Published on: July 30, 2019
Ecological niche structure and rangewide abundance patterns of species
Enrique Martínez-Meyer1, Daniel Díaz-Porras, A Townsend Peterson
1Instituto de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico. emm@ibiologia.unam.mx
Abstract:
Spatial abundance patterns across species' ranges have attracted intense attention in macroecology and biogeography. One key hypothesis has been that abundance declines with geographical distance from the range centre, but tests of this idea have shown that the effect may occur indeed only in a minority of cases. We explore an alternative hypothesis: that species' abundances decline with distance from the centroid of the species' habitable conditions in environmental space (the ecological niche). We demonstrate consistent negative abundance-ecological distance relationships across all 11 species analysed (turtles to wolves), and that relationships in environmental space are consistently stronger than relationships in geographical space.
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