2026-10-09T08:50:56Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33440017 2026-09-27T16:36:01Z category_24217 category_24235 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Re-evaluating the Environmental Heterogeneity–Diversity Relationship Across Taxa and Spatial Scales Rongfei Su (22043465) Community ecology (excl. invasive species ecology) Terrestrial ecology Heterogeneity-Diversity Relationship <p dir="ltr">Environmental heterogeneity (EH) is a fundamental driver of biodiversity, yet empirical heterogeneity–diversity relationships (HDRs) vary widely in form, limiting their generality across taxa and spatial scales. The area–heterogeneity trade-off (AHTO) hypothesis proposes that increasing EH creates additional niche opportunities while reducing the effective area available to individual species, but this mechanism has rarely been tested across broad environmental gradients and taxonomic groups. Here we develop an integrated framework linking species-energy, niche, and island biogeography theories and evaluate its prediction across 868 tree, 584 bird, and 122 mammal species throughout the contiguous United States. We quantify EH from the multidimensional dissimilarity of AlphaEarth Foundation Model embeddings, integrating climatic, topographic, edaphic, structural, and compositional variation within a common representation. Across taxa, our results support the AHTO framework, with the clearest patterns in trees and birds: species richness shows a unimodal relationship with EH, whereas mean species abundance shows a previously undocumented U-shaped relationship. The richness maximum and abundance minimum shift toward higher EH with increasing spatial scale. Functional traits further predict species response, with acquisitive, fast-living, broad-niched, well-dispersing species respond more positively to EH. These results establish AHTO as a general organizing principle whose expression depends on spatial scale and species functional traits, providing a unified basis for understanding when EH promotes or constrains biodiversity.</p> 2026-09-27T16:36:01Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33440017.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Re-evaluating_the_Environmental_Heterogeneity_Diversity_Relationship_Across_Taxa_and_Spatial_Scales/33440017 CC BY 4.0