Patterns in commoness and rarity in central European birds: Reliability of the core-satellite hypothesis within a large scale

Abstract

Using the data of bird distribution in central Europe we show that the core-satellite pattern of species occupancy of individual sites (species are either very common or very rare) are due to the processes of spatial population dynamics: although the bimodal pattern would emerge even if species distributed themselves only according to their respective abundance and/or habitat preferences, these random models predict higher number of common species and lower number of the rare ones than observed