Data from: Lizard richness in mainland China is more strongly correlated with energy and climatic stability than with diversification rates
Data files
Sep 21, 2023 version files 24.81 MB
Abstract
Aim: Contemporary environmental, historical, and evolutionary factors are increasingly used to decipher the drivers of spatial patterns of species richness. Evidence of such correlations for Chinese reptiles is scarce and poorly understood. We therefore explored the validity of the environmental capacity, historical climatic stability, and diversification rates hypotheses on Chinese lizard richness.
Location: Mainland China
Taxon: Squamata: Sauria
Methods: We mapped the distribution ranges of all 237 lizards in mainland China using a combination of different datasets. We used current environmental conditions (ambient energy, environmental productivity, and habitat heterogeneity), historical climate stability indices (long-term: since ~3.3 Ma and short-term: since the Last Glacial Maximum), and mean tip diversification rates to test whether current environmental conditions, historical climate change, and diversification rates drive contemporary richness patterns of lizards in China. We applied piecewise structural equation models (pSEM) to jointly evaluate our hypotheses, considering direct and indirect effects.
Results: Chinese lizards showed latitudinal diversity gradients. We found consistent support for contemporary climatic and environmental factors' relationships with richness. Richness was also positively correlated with short-term climatic stability, but less so with long-term stability. Diversification rates were only seldom found to be positively correlated with lizard richness.
Main conclusions: Our results support the environmental capacity and historical climate hypotheses, which link high richness to highly productive warm and stable regions (and low richness to cold and unstable regions). We conclude that post-speciation dispersal and short-term climatic oscillations quickly swamp the long-term signal of diversification rates and climatic fluctuations, creating strong current climate-richness associations.
README: Data from: Lizard richness in mainland China is more strongly correlated with energy and climatic stability than with diversification rates
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.95x69p8qw
<br>
Description of the data and file structure
This dataset including three files:
1. An EXCEL including all raw references that we got the distribution points of Chinese lizards.
2. The polygon files of Chinese lizards that used for this study, there are two versions of the polygons: Mainland20230704.shp and 266MAp20230615.shp
The first one is the file that we used in this study (only mainland China), the second files including the Chinese lizards from both mainland and Hainan &Taiwan islands (N=266species). Besides, all the map of Chinese lizards also can be found from www.sinitic-reptile.top. (please email Tao Liang if you cannot visit the website for the maps).
3. The nexus file including all 1000 random trees of all 266 species, besides there is a word file that including all genbank information for all species and the details when building the tree.
Methods
The data type of this study is the species range polygons, while these polygons based on the geographical locations (longitude, latitude) of each species, these points were collected from published papers, books, thesis, reports, as well as personal communication by the authors.