Elevational Gradients in Species Richness

Abstract The abiotic and biotic gradients on mountains have enormous potential to improve our understanding of species distributions, species richness patterns and conservation. Here we describe how abiotic factors change with elevation, how flora and fauna respond to these changes and how elevational species richness patterns have been studied to uncover drivers of biodiversity. There are four main trends in elevational species richness: decreasing richness with increasing elevation, plateaus in richness across low elevations then decreasing with or without a mid‐elevation peak and a unimodal pattern with a mid‐elevational peak. We discuss the history of elevational richness studies and overview the various…