title: Revealing patterns of local species richness along environmental gradients with a novel network tool.
abstract: How species richness relates to environmental gradients at large extents is commonly investigated aggregating local site data to coarser grains. However, such relationships often change with the grain of analysis, potentially hiding the local signal. Here we show that a novel network technique, the "method of reflections", could unveil the relationships between species richness and climate without such drawbacks. We introduced a new index related to potential species richness, which revealed large scale patterns by including at the local community level information about species distribution throughout the dataset (i.e., the network). The method effectively removed noise, identifying how far site richness was from potential. When applying it to study woody species richness patterns in Spain, we observed that annual precipitation and mean annual temperature explained large parts of the variance of the newly defined species richness, highlighting that, at the local scale, communities in drier and warmer areas were potentially the species richest. Our method went far beyond what geographical upscaling of the data could unfold, and the insights obtained strongly suggested that it is a powerful instrument to detect key factors underlying species richness patterns, and that it could have numerous applications in ecology and other fields.
authors.affiliation: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences Group, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands.|Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Spain.
authors.forename: Mara
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Baudena
authors.affiliation: Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Spain.|Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Angel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sánchez
authors.affiliation: School of Economics and African Institute of Financial Markets and Risk Management, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X1, 7700 Rondebosch (Cape Town), South Africa.|Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Spain.
authors.forename: Co-Pierre
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Georg
authors.affiliation: Biological and Environmental Sciences, School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA (Stirling), United Kingdom.|Forest Ecology and Restoration Group, Department of Life Sciences, University of Alcalá, Edificio de Ciencias, Campus Universitario, 28805 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain.
authors.forename: Paloma
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ruiz-Benito
authors.affiliation: Forest Ecology and Restoration Group, Department of Life Sciences, University of Alcalá, Edificio de Ciencias, Campus Universitario, 28805 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel Á
authors.initials: MÁ
authors.lastname: Rodríguez
authors.affiliation: Forest Ecology and Restoration Group, Department of Life Sciences, University of Alcalá, Edificio de Ciencias, Campus Universitario, 28805 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Zavala
authors.affiliation: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences Group, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Max
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rietkerk
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D065928:Forests; D008954:Models, Biological; D011891:Rain; D013030:Spain; D013045:Species Specificity; D013696:Temperature