Université de Fribourg

Water limitation prevails over energy in European diversity gradients of sheetweb spiders (Araneae: Linyphiidae)

Kumschick, Sabrina ; Schmidt-Entling, Martin H. ; Bacher, Sven ; Hickler, Thomas ; Entling, Wiebke ; Nentwig, Wolfgang

In: Basic and Applied Ecology, 2009, vol. 10, no. 8, p. 754-762

Across large spatial scales, species richness in many taxa is mainly determined by climatic variables. However, some of the mechanisms behind large-scale patterns of species richness and abundance are expected to act on the community level, and on a smaller scale than the resolution of the data commonly used for deriving these patterns. We studied the distribution of sheetweb spiders (Araneae:...

Université de Fribourg

Body size–climate relationships of European spiders

Entling, Wiebke ; Schmidt-Entling, Martin H. ; Bacher, Sven ; Brandl, Roland ; Nentwig, Wolfgang

In: Journal of Biogeography, 2009///doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02216.x

Aim: Geographic body size patterns of mammals and birds can be partly understood under the framework of Bergmann's rule. Climatic influences on body size of invertebrates, however, appear highly variable and lack a comparable, generally applicable theoretical framework. We derived predictions for body size–climate relationships for spiders from the literature and tested them using three...