Geographical patterns of body mass distribution are robust even when inserting uncertainty in average estimates of species body mass

Pardiñas, Valenzuela, and Salazar-Bravo (2017) are concerned that eventual differences in species mean body masses and in the phylogenetic hypothesis used in Maestri et al. (2016)—compared with those available on other potential sources—could affect the results of our original article. Here, we used...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of biogeography 2017-11, Vol.44 (11), p.2678-2680
Main Authors: Maestri, Renan, Luza, André Luís, de Barros, Lurdiana Dayse, Hartz, Sandra Maria, Ferrari, Augusto, de Freitas, Thales Renato Ochotorena, Duarte, Leandro D. S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Body mass
community weighed‐means
CORRESPONDENCE
Hypotheses
Mass distribution
phylogenetic hypothesis
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Physical growth
Raunkiaeran shortfall
Sigmodontinae
South America
Species
trait uncertainty
Uncertainty
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Summary:Pardiñas, Valenzuela, and Salazar-Bravo (2017) are concerned that eventual differences in species mean body masses and in the phylogenetic hypothesis used in Maestri et al. (2016)—compared with those available on other potential sources—could affect the results of our original article. Here, we used a new phylogenetic hypothesis to conduct the same analyses of the original article, and we randomly sampled 1000 values of body mass within approximately 35% upper and lower intervals around the mean body mass for each species included in our database. We show that our previous results and conclusions are robust and valid, and they persist despite uncertainty in mean body mass estimation. We argue that sampling variation and uncertainty in both species mean body mass estimation and phylogenetic hypothesis are to be expected and should not always be confused with inaccuracies.
ISSN:0305-0270
1365-2699
DOI:10.1111/jbi.13058