Aim To identify the reasons behind differing geographical species richness patterns of range‐restricted and widespread species. Location The Western Hemisphere. Methods We used regression to determine the strongest environmental predictors of richness for widespread and range‐restricted mammal species in 10,000 km 2 quadrats in the continental Americas. We then used range‐placement models to predict the expected correlation be...

Global changes have the potential to cause a mass extinction. Predicting how species will respond to anticipated changes is a necessary prerequisite to effectively conserving them and reducing extinction rates. Species niche models are widely used for such predictions, but their reliability over long time periods is known to vary. However, climate and land use changes in northern countries provide a pseudo‐experiment to test m...

The latitudinal diversity gradient has been hypothesized to reflect past evolutionary dynamics driven by climatic niche conservation during cladogenesis, i.e. the tropical conservatism hypothesis. Here we show that the species diversity of treefrogs (Hylidae) across the western hemisphere is actually independent of evolutionary niche dynamics. We evaluated three key predictions of the tropical conservatism hypothesis that rela...

Aim To test whether the temperature dependence of individuals’ metabolic rates is the mechanism shaping broad‐scale species‐richness gradients as proposed in the Metabolic Theory of Ecology recently proposed by Allen, Gillooly and Brown. Location North America, north of Mexico. Methods Metabolic Theory predicts that the natural logarithm of species richness will be a linear function of environmental temperature (( kT ) −1 , wh...