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Geographical patterns of body mass distribution are robust even when inserting uncertainty in average estimates of species body mass
Author(s) -
Maestri Renan,
Luza André Luís,
Barros Lurdiana Dayse,
Hartz Sandra Maria,
Ferrari Augusto,
Freitas Thales Renato Ochotorena,
Duarte Leandro D. S.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of biogeography
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 158
eISSN - 1365-2699
pISSN - 0305-0270
DOI - 10.1111/jbi.13058
Subject(s) - phylogenetic tree , statistics , estimation , biology , sampling (signal processing) , ecology , evolutionary biology , mathematics , physics , genetics , management , detector , gene , optics , economics
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.