Biodiversity Patterns and Environmental Drivers

Biodiversity patterns reflect the distribution and variety of life across Earth’s surface, ranging from local species assemblages to global biomes. Classic gradients such as the increase in species richness towards the equator illustrate the interplay of climatic energy, evolutionary history and habitat heterogeneity. Environmental drivers—including temperature, precipitation, habitat fragmentation and topographic complexity—act over multiple spatial and temporal scales, shaping species richness, genetic variation and phylogenetic diversity. Historical processes, such as glacial cycles and plate tectonics, have imprinted on contemporary distributions, while ecological interactions and dispersal abilities mediate real-time responses to changing conditions. Integrating macroecological patterns with eco-evolutionary mechanisms is essential for predicting biodiversity responses under ongoing climate change and guiding conservation strategies that maintain ecosystem functionality and resilience.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have shifted from purely geographic to climate-defined spaces, demonstrating that both the size and isolation of climatic regions powerfully influence species richness and turnover among terrestrial tetrapods. By recasting diversity patterns in a multidimensional climatic framework, researchers accounted for nearly 90 per cent of global variation in species richness, revealing a nuanced balance between climate characteristics and their spatial arrangement. Complementary work on terrestrial mammals has uncovered that deep evolutionary history and past climate stability underpin intraspecific genetic diversity. Models indicate that regions exposed to rapid palaeoclimatic shifts tend to harbour reduced genetic variation, while interannual precipitation variability promotes diversity within populations. Together, these findings highlight the dual legacy of evolutionary time and climatic dynamics in shaping both taxonomic and genetic facets of biodiversity.

Biodiversity Patterns and Environmental Drivers publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in biodiversity patterns and environmental drivers across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Species richness: The number of distinct species within a specified area or assemblage.

Phylogenetic diversity: A measure of biodiversity that quantifies the total evolutionary history represented by a group of species.

Intraspecific genetic diversity: Variation in genetic composition among individuals within a single species.

Spatial grain: The resolution or size of the spatial units (e.g. grid cells) used in ecological or biogeographical analyses.

Eco-evolutionary simulation: A computational model integrating ecological processes (e.g. dispersal, competition) with evolutionary mechanisms (e.g. speciation, trait change) across landscapes.

References

1. The geography of climate and the global patterns of species diversity. Nature (2023).
2. Evolutionary history and past climate change shape the distribution of genetic diversity in terrestrial mammals. Nature Communications (2020).
3. PALEO‐PGEM‐Series: A spatial time series of the global climate over the last 5 million years (Plio‐Pleistocene). Global Ecology and Biogeography (2023).
4. gen3sis: A general engine for eco-evolutionary simulations of the processes that shape Earth’s biodiversity. PLOS Biology (2021).
5. A cross‐scale assessment of productivity–diversity relationships. Global Ecology and Biogeography (2020).