Relationships between Local Distribution and Geographic Range of Desert Heteromyid Rodents

• Published in: Oikos Vol. 53; no. 3; pp. 303 - 308
• Main Author: Bowers, Michael A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Munksgaard International Booksellers and Publishers 01-11-1988; Blackwell
• Subjects: Animal and plant ecology; Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Animals; Biological and medical sciences; Demecology; Ecological genetics; Ecology; Evolution; Extinct species; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Glass art; Hemic system; Mammalia; Population ecology; Rodents; Species; Synecology; Vertebrata; Vertebrata; Mammalia; Desert; Geographic distribution; Population density; Rodentia
• ISSN: 0030-1299; 1600-0706
• DOI: 10.2307/3565528

The extent to which desert heteromyid rodent species are distributed geographically is negatively correlated with their variability in abundance across sites within local regions. In pairwise comparisons, those species with larger ranges generally had lower coefficients of variation in local density across sites than species with smaller ranges. Computer simulations showed this pattern to be significantly non-random in three of the eight data sets examined (data analyzed from three other studies showed the same pattern at 0.1 < p < 0.2). These results are consistent with the abundance/distribution theories proposed by Hanski and Brown. The results support a large body of literature suggesting that wide-ranging species may have greater ecological success and more evolutionary inertia than species with more restricted distributions. The results also suggest that the ability of species to occur consistently over space may be only indirectly related to the ability to occur stably over time.