DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8w9ghx3nz
title: Distances, climatic differences, and vegetation similarities of alpine grasslands in Europe

description: The importance of environmental difference among sites and dispersal
 limitations of species to the explanation of diversity differs among
 biological systems and geographical regions. We hypothesized that climate
 and then dispersal limitation will predominantly explain the similarity of
 alpine vegetation at increasing distances between pairs of regions at
 sub-continental extent. We computed the similarity of all pairs of 23
 European mountain regions below 50°N after dividing the species lists of
 each region by calcareous or siliceous substrates. Distance decay in
 similarity was better fitted by a cubic polynomial than a negative
 exponential function, and the fit was better on calcareous than on
 siliceous substrate. Commonality analysis revealed that the proportion of
 explanation of beta diversity by climatic difference had unimodal patterns
 on a gradient of increasing distance between regions, while explanation by
 dispersal limitation had consistently rising patterns on both substrates.
 On siliceous substrate, dispersal limitation explained more of the
 variation in beta-diversity only at longer distances, but it was
 predominant at all distances on calcareous substrate. The steeper response
 to distance at &lt;1600 km and &gt;2600 km may indicate dispersal
 limitation at different temporal scales, and the uptick in the response to
 distance at the longest distances may reflect how isolated some regions
 have been before and since the Last Glacial Maximum.
description: Distance data were derived
 from a cost-distance surface by Jiménez-Alfaro, B., S. Abdulhak, F.
 Attorre, A. Bergamini, M.L. Carranza, A. Chiarucci, A., R. Ćušterevska, S.
 Dullinger, R.G. Gavilán, G. Giusso del Galdo, N. Kuzmanović, P. Laiolo, J.
 Loidi, G.P. Malanson, C. Marcenó, D. Milanović, E.R. Pansing, J.V.
 Roces-Díaz, E. Ruprecht, J. Šibik, A. Stanisci, R. Testolin, J-P.
 Theurillat, K. Vassilev, W. Willner, M. Winkler. 2021. Postglacial
 determinants of regional species pools in alpine grasslands. Global
 Ecology and Biogeography 30: 1101-1115.  Climate differences were derived
 from principal components analysis of data from CHELSA v1.2. (CHELSA; https://envicloud.wsl.ch/#/?prefix=chelsa%2Fchelsa_V1 and at Dryad: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.5061/dryad.kd1d4) Vegetation similarity was derived using Beta-Simpson similarity from Baselga, A. and F. Laprieur. 2015. Comparing methods to separate components of beta diversity. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 6: 1069-1079 applied to the regional vegetation data with Jiménez-Alfaro, B., S. Abdulhak, F. Attorre, A. Bergamini, M.L. Carranza, A. Chiarucci, A., R. Ćušterevska, S. Dullinger, R.G. Gavilán, G. Giusso del Galdo, N. Kuzmanović, P. Laiolo, J. Loidi, G.P. Malanson, C. Marcenó, D. Milanović, E.R. Pansing, J.V. Roces-Díaz, E. Ruprecht, J. Šibik, A. Stanisci, R. Testolin, J-P. Theurillat, K. Vassilev, W. Willner, M. Winkler. 2021. Postglacial determinants of regional species pools in alpine grasslands. Global Ecology and Biogeography 30: 1101-1115. (at Dryad: doi:10.5061%2Fdryad.0cfxpnw1h).
description: Empty cells are for regions without calcareous substrate.