A recent comment from Knouft ( ) has suggested that our original article (Dallas et al . ) was an ‘inappropriate application of biodiversity data’. Here, we affirm our results, and address the more general point about biodiversity data use.

The pervasive idea that species should be most abundant in the centre of their geographic range or centre of their climatic niche is a key assumption in many existing ecological hypotheses and has been declared a general macroecological rule. However, empirical support for decreasing population abundance with increasing distance from geographic range or climatic niche centre ( distance–abundance relationships) remains fairly w...