玉龙雪山植物多样性海拔分布型.docVIP

————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 玉龙雪山植物多样性海拔分布型 Xu et al. SpringerPlus (2016) 5:1566 DOI 10.1186/s40064-016-3052-1 Altitudinal patterns of?plant diversity on?the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, southwestern China Xiang Xu, Huayong Zhang*, Wang Tian, Xiaoqiang Zeng and Hai Huang *Correspondence: rceens@ North China Electric Power University, Research Center for Engineering Ecology and Nonlinear Science, Beijing 102206, ChinaAbstract Background: Understanding altitudinal patterns of biological diversity and their underlying mechanisms is critically important for biodiversity conservation in moun-tainous regions. The contribution of area to plant diversity patterns is widely acknowl-edged and may mask the effects of other determinant factors. In this context, it is important to examine altitudinal patterns of corrected taxon richness by eliminating the area effect. Here we adopt two methods to correct observed taxon richness: a power-law relationship between richness and area, hereafter “method 1”; and richness counted in equal-area altitudinal bands, hereafter “method 2”. We compare these two methods on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which is the nearest large-scale altitudi-nal gradient to the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere. Results: We find that seed plant species richness, genus richness, family richness, and species richness of trees, shrubs, herbs and Groups I–III (species with elevational range size lt;150, between 150 and 500, and gt;500 m, respectively) display distinct hump- shaped patterns along the equal-elevation altitudinal gradient. The corrected taxon richness based on method 2 (TRcor2) also shows hump-shaped patterns for all plant groups, while the one based on method 1 (TRcor1) does not. As for the abiotic factors influencing the patterns, mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation, and mid-domain effect explain a larger part of the variation in TRcor2 than in T