PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 62: Biodiversity I.
Presiding: P Baker
Thursday, August 7. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Meeting Room 100.

Rapaport's rule, latitudinal patterns, and the frequency distributions of range sizes of New World woody plant species.

Weiser, Michael ^*,1, Enquist, Brian^{1, 2}, Boyle, Brad^{1, 2}, Reddy, Srinivas¹, ¹ University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA² Center for Applied Biodiversity Science- Conservation International, Washington, DC

ABSTRACT- Rapaport's rule posits that species from higher latitudes have ranges with greater latitudinal extent. This pattern has been claimed for North American trees but has not been analyzed for temperate and tropical trees across North, Central, and South America. Recent analyses indicate that tropical trees may have larger ranges that originally thought, casting doubt on the importance of Rapaport patterns driving tropical alpha diversity. Here we use a global compendium of forest plot and herbarium data to examine the range sizes of New World woody plants. Latitudinal range extents are determined by using specimen-based range maps collected from a network of herbarium datasets. We specifically focus on the how the frequency distributions of range sizes and latitudinal extent of range vary with latitude from Canada to Chile.

Key words: tropical, SALVIAS, temperate, diversity