Geographic Variation in Body Size Distributions of Continental Avifauna
Geographic Variation in Body Size Distributions of Continental Avifauna
This chapter examines variation in the body size distributions of birds on different continents. The results show that the structure of body size distributions is scale dependent and is influenced by the size of continents. Distributions for continents and geographic regions are not simple random mixtures of species from the global distribution but instead are “filtered” by continent size in at least two ways. First, larger continents have a wider range of body sizes than smaller continents, indicated by the increase in variance in log body size distributions with larger continents. Second, larger continents tend to have a disproportionate share of large species. The biogeographic mechanism and the nature of process that lead to this filtering of body size as a function of continent size are also discussed.
Keywords: body size, continent size, biogeographic mechanism, scale dependent
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