| Summary: | Contribución presentada en Early Career "Advances in Biogeography" Conference, 23-25 septiembre 2011, Oxford. Más información en http://www.biogeography.org/html/Meetings/2011Oxford. It is well known the drastic climatic changes occurred during the Pleistocene have profoundly shaped diversity gradients in the Western Palaearctic (i.e. the existence of southern ice·age refuges and the subsequent recolonisation process). Habitat stability and species dispersal ability have been recently highlighted as key factors when determining patterns of speCies distributions in freshwater ecosystems, i.e. there should be a negative relationship between the habitat persistence and the propensity for dispersal of its inhabitants. Since lentic habitats have been generally considered to be more ephemeral than lotic ones, we can expect species living in lentic habitats have conserved a higher dispersal capacity than species living in lotic habitats.Thus, we hypothesize this fact could have caused important differences in the current geographic ranges between lotic and lentic species. Water beetle check-lists from 11 regions in the Western Palaearctic (from South Morocco to North Sweden) were compiled, 647 species belonging to 14 families being classified into lotic and lentic specialist, generalist species not being took into account. We analyse the variation of water beetle species richness across latitude at different scales. In particular, to test our central hypothesis, as a main novelty supplied by this work, we compare the contribution of local to regional diversity across latitude in 181 sampling sites spread on the 11 regions referred above, looking for differences between lotic and lentic habitats. We also assess beta-diversity (in terms of species turnover or nestedness) between species adapted to lotic and lentic habitats. Peer Reviewed
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