Abstract: Macroecology emerged at the end of the 1980's as a synthetic discipline aimed at describing and understanding biodiversity patterns at large spatial and temporal scales. Here, we review the state of the art of macroecology in Mexico by identifying: (i) the main theoretical and applied contributions made by Mexican researchers; (ii) knowledge gaps and theoretic-methodological challenges, and (iii) perspectives of this research field in Mexico. After conducting systematic searches in the Web of Science database and targeted specific topic searches we found 163 articles published by Mexican scientists, most of them in the last decade. Thirty seven percent of these papers were focused at a regional scale and 31% at a national scale, and most of them (90%) corresponded to terrestrial habitats. Mammals, plants and birds were the groups better represented (33%; 21%, and 17%, respectively). The main contributions were developed in the study of diversity patterns, ecological niche, analyses of diversity at different scales (alpha, beta and gamma diversity), and the distributional area. It is important to incorporate subjects such as abundance, phylogenetic and functional diversity and transform the discipline into a more predictive one able to contribute in solving environmental issues at national and global scales.

Resumen: La macroecología surgió a finales de la década de 1980 y se definió como un programa de investigación enfocado a describir y entender los patrones de biodiversidad en escalas espaciales y temporales amplias. En esta revisión identificamos: a) las principales aportaciones teórico-conceptuales y prácticas, desarrolladas por autores mexicanos; b) los vacíos de conocimiento y desafíos teórico-metodológicos, y c) perspectivas en este campo de estudio en México. A través de búsquedas en la base de datos de artículos científicos registrados en la Web of Science y de búsquedas dirigidas, encontramos 163 artículos, la mayoría publicados en la última década. Un elevado porcentaje de los trabajos se desarrollaron a una escala regional (37%) y nacional (31%) y se concentraron en el medio terrestre (90%). Los grupos biológicos más estudiados fueron los mamíferos (33%), las plantas vasculares (21%) y las aves (17%). Los temas más estudiados en México fueron los patrones de diversidad, aspectos del nicho ecológico, el análisis de la diversidad a distintas escalas (alfa, beta y gamma) y el área de distribución geográfica de las especies. Es importante incorporar aspectos de abundancia y de diversidad filogenética y funcional que permitan incrementar la capacidad explicativa y predictiva de la macroecología.

Eigenfunction analyses have been widely used to model patterns of autocorrelation in time, space and phylogeny. In a phylogenetic context, Diniz-Filho et al. (1998) proposed what they called Phylogenetic Eigenvector Regression (PVR), in which pairwise phylogenetic distances among species are submitted to a Principal Coordinate Analysis, and eigenvectors are then used as explanatory variables in regression, correlation or ANOVAs. More recently, a new approach called Phylogenetic Eigenvector Mapping (PEM) was proposed, with the main advantage of explicitly incorporating a model-based warping in phylogenetic distance in which an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (O-U) process is fitted to data before eigenvector extraction. Here we compared PVR and PEM in respect to estimated phylogenetic signal, correlated evolution under alternative evolutionary models and phylogenetic imputation, using simulated data. Despite similarity between the two approaches, PEM has a slightly higher prediction ability and is more general than the original PVR. Even so, in a conceptual sense, PEM may provide a technique in the best of both worlds, combining the flexibility of data-driven and empirical eigenfunction analyses and the sounding insights provided by evolutionary models well known in comparative analyses.