Narrow Results

The geographical patterns of plant species richness at the large scale is one of the most pervasive features of life on Earth. This study described this pattern for plants from 18 nature reserves in China subtropical zone and explored the potential explanations behind this pattern. By means of Pearson's correlation analyses, the hidden forces that shape the plant species richness pattern in China subtropical zone were found. The findings showed that plant species richness variation was explained by both energy and water measured as annual potential evapotranspiration and minimum monthly precipitation, respectively. Moreover, climatic heterogeneity in nature reserve habitat explained more variance in plant species richness than topographical heterogeneity. This study emphasizes the importance of assessing the role of climatic heterogeneity in shaping plant species richness pattern.

Accurate climate data is an essential environmental factor to quantify ecology, geography and other related research fields. In this paper, we performed thin-plate smoothing spline interpolation implemented in ANUSPLIN on monthly climate data and obtained precipitation and temperature monthly interpolation surfaces in Kangdian area. Error analysis showed the RTMSE of temperature was less than 0.513 and the RTMSE of precipitation was less than 12.700 in most months. Compared with IDW and Kriging method, the proposed method could get more accurate results. It indicated that ANUSPLIN method could be the optimal spatial interpolation method in interpolating the monthly meteorological data in Kangdian area and other areas with complex terrain.