Testing a theoretical framework for the environment-species abundance paradigm: a new approach to the Abundant Centre Hypothesis

The linkage between environment, a species fitness and its abundance is central to the theory of evolution. So far, all studies of this linkage have been heuristic and empirical due to an inability to determine fitness either experimentally (independent of abundance) or theoretically (from species-environment interaction). One category of such studies involves the Abundant Centre Hypothesis which posits that a species abundance rises to a maximum at the centre of its range. We argue that the confusing mix of results from ACH studies arises from ignoring the central premise that the abundance distribution cannot be independent of the environment. First, we employed a theoretical framework to identify an environmental context (an elevational transect; 200-2800 m in the eastern Himalayas) likely to favour ACH. We then improved upon some previously identified conceptual and methodological shortcomings of ACH studies. Using systematically collected bird data (245 species; 15867 records) from that transect we found that the community average abundance profile is symmetric, as expected by ACH. Notwithstanding which, the abundance profiles of individual species showed a small degree of asymmetry which was correlated with elevation. This elevational dependence may be due to the hard elevational limits at the lower and upper ends of the mountain, as expected from theoretical considerations. We also showed that the average abundance profile shape is close to gaussian, while ruling out uniform and inverted-quadratic shapes. This work demonstrates that selecting a particular category of environmental contexts can help in integrating theoretical tools into a field dominated by empirical studies. Such a union should spur the development of more detailed and testable theoretical models for better insights in an important field.