TY - JOUR
T1 - Hot-spot facts and artifacts-questioning Israel's great biodiversity
AU - Roll, Uri
AU - Stone, Lewi
AU - Meiri, Shai
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Oren Barnea, Jonathan Belmaker, Yoav Binyamini, Rich Grenyer, Joaquin Hortal, Andy Purvis, Daniel Simberloff, Andrew Solow, Kostas Triantis, Erez Ungar, Yoram Yom-Tov, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. UR is supported by the Adams Fellowship Program of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
PY - 2009/12/1
Y1 - 2009/12/1
N2 - Israel's biological diversity has been praised as being particularly rich in relation to its size; however this assumption was never tested when taking into account the empirical form of the species-area relationship. Here we compared the species richness of different countries to see if the Israeli diversity is exceptionally rich when area is accurately accounted for. We compared richness of amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles, flowering plants, conifers and cycads, and ferns in all the world's countries. We further tested the effects of mean latitude, altitude span, and insularity on species richness both for all world countries and just for Mediterranean countries. For all taxa and in all tests, Israel lies within the prediction intervals of the models. Out of 42 tests, Israel's residuals lie in the upper decile of positive residuals once: for reptiles, when compared to all world countries, taking all predicting factors into account. Using only countries larger than 1000 km2, Israel was placed as top residual when compared to other Mediterranean countries for mammals and reptiles. We therefore conclude that Israel's species richness does not significantly exceed the expected values for a country its size. This is true when comparing it to either world or just Mediterranean countries. Adding more predicting factors does not change this fact.
AB - Israel's biological diversity has been praised as being particularly rich in relation to its size; however this assumption was never tested when taking into account the empirical form of the species-area relationship. Here we compared the species richness of different countries to see if the Israeli diversity is exceptionally rich when area is accurately accounted for. We compared richness of amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles, flowering plants, conifers and cycads, and ferns in all the world's countries. We further tested the effects of mean latitude, altitude span, and insularity on species richness both for all world countries and just for Mediterranean countries. For all taxa and in all tests, Israel lies within the prediction intervals of the models. Out of 42 tests, Israel's residuals lie in the upper decile of positive residuals once: for reptiles, when compared to all world countries, taking all predicting factors into account. Using only countries larger than 1000 km2, Israel was placed as top residual when compared to other Mediterranean countries for mammals and reptiles. We therefore conclude that Israel's species richness does not significantly exceed the expected values for a country its size. This is true when comparing it to either world or just Mediterranean countries. Adding more predicting factors does not change this fact.
KW - Biodiversity
KW - Diversity
KW - Israel
KW - Mediterranean
KW - Species-area relationship
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=71049136229&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1560/IJEE.55.3.263
DO - 10.1560/IJEE.55.3.263
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:71049136229
SN - 1565-9801
VL - 55
SP - 263
EP - 279
JO - Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution
JF - Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution
IS - 3
ER -