Abstract:Our goal was to interrogate Janzen’s idea that “mountain passes are
higher in the tropics” by investigating putative ecological and
biogeographic drivers of patterns of elevational range-sizes among
equatorial plant families. We used herbarium records for sixty
species-rich plant families, representing a total of 18535 species, to
estimate distributions over a 4500 m elevational gradient. For each
family, we estimated the change in average range-sizes with increasing
elevation (i.e. Rapoport’s rule, abbreviate… Show more
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