Fig 1.
The synergism between environmental gradients (EG) driving biodiversity patterns.
Arrows indicate causal assumptions among EG and species richness. Topographic gradients act on diversity components via indirect links with climate and vegetation, while climatic gradients act indirectly through their effect on vegetation.
Fig 2.
Land use map for Neotropical realm obtained through the GLC-SHARE database.
For each 1° × 1° grid cell, the land cover diversity was extracted as the Shannon index of land cover classes.
Fig 3.
Forest canopy height for Neotropical region obtained through the 3D Global Vegetation Map database.
For each 1° × 1° grid cell, two measures of vegetation complexity were extracted: (i) standard deviation of forest canopy height and (ii) forest canopy height range.
Fig 4.
Vertebrate richness patterns in the Neotropical realm.
Species richness of amphibians (A), non-volant mammals (B), bats (C), and birds (D).
Fig 5.
Variation in species richness explained by environmental gradients.
Primary colors (red, green and blue) denote the proportion of variation explained by the unique fraction of the topographic, biotic or climatic sets. Secondary colors (yellow, cian, magenta) denote the variation commonly explained by two of the three types of environmental sets. White color indicates the variation commonly explained by biotic, climatic and topographic set. Gray colors represent the variation explained by the unique spatial fraction (dark gray) or by the shared fraction between the spatial set and any other environmental set (light gray). Unexplained variation is omitted for simplicity (see Supporting Information for further details on variation partitioning analyses). Each letter in the Venn diagram represents a fraction of the variation partitioning analysis and add up to the total set of biotic [aeghklno], climatic [befiklmo], topographic [cfgjlmno] and spatial [dhijkmno] factors.