Re-evaluating the Environmental Heterogeneity–Diversity Relationship Across Taxa and Spatial Scales

The area–heterogeneity trade-off (AHTO) hypothesis proposes that increasing EH creates additional niche opportunities while reducing the effective area available to individual species, but this mechanism has rarely been tested across broad environmental gradients and taxonomic groups.

Here we develop an integrated framework linking species-energy, niche, and island biogeography theories and evaluate its prediction across 868 tree, 584 bird, and 122 mammal species throughout the contiguous United States. We quantify EH from the multidimensional dissimilarity of AlphaEarth Foundation Model embeddings, integrating climatic, topographic, edaphic, structural, and compositional variation within a common representation.