TY  - JOUR
A1  - Peters, Marcell K.
A1  - Classen, Alice
A1  - Müller, Jörg
A1  - Steffan‑Dewenter, Ingolf
T1  - Increasing the phylogenetic coverage for understanding broad-scale diversity gradients
JF  - Oecologia
N2  - Despite decades of scientific effort, there is still no consensus on the determinants of broad-scale gradients of animal diver-sity. We argue that general drivers of diversity are unlikely to be found among the narrowly defined taxa which are typically analyzed in studies of broad-scale diversity gradients because ecological niches evolve largely conservatively. This causes constraints in the use of available niche space leading to systematic differences in diversity gradients among taxa. We instead advocate studies of phylogenetically diverse animal communities along broad environmental gradients. Such multi-taxa communities are less constrained in resource use and diversification and may be better targets for testing major classical hypotheses on diversity gradients. Besides increasing the spatial scale in analyses, expanding the phylogenetic coverage may be a second way to achieve higher levels of generality in studies of broad-scale diversity gradients
KW  - elevational diversity
KW  - DNA metabarcoding
KW  - negative density dependence
KW  - productivity hypothesis
KW  - species energy theory
KW  - temperature-speciation hypothesis
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-232519
SN  - 0029-8549
VL  - 192
ER  -