La macroecología en México: historia, avances y perspectivas

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.