Latitudinal Gradients in Species Diversity: The Effect of Sampling

Mandal, Samik (2021) Latitudinal Gradients in Species Diversity: The Effect of Sampling. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

Text (MS Dissertation of Samik Mandal (16MS098)) 16MS098_Thesis_file.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (1MB)

Abstract

Latitudinal diversity gradient (famously known as LDG) is a biogeographic phenomenon of variation in species diversity with latitude. In general, in numerous taxonomic groups, it has been observed that diversity tends to be the highest near the equator and diminishes as we move towards the poles. The paternal causes of this pattern include several biological, ecological, and evolutionary hypotheses. Here, by using published global databases of LDG on different taxonomic groups, collected from almost all over the world, I tend to test the effect of sampling intensity (i.e., the number of sampling) on LDG with the expectation that higher sampling can lead to higher number of species diversity for different groups at different latitudinal bins. In all of the five global databases that I have analyzed here, it has been observed that latitudes having more intense sampling always hosts the highest number of species. This pattern holds even if the highest species diversity is present in the subtropics, suggesting that sampling can be another good potential hypothesis explaining LDG. In the case of tropics, the highest diversity can be found there simply because we have collected the highest number of samples from there.

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