Climate stability and the current patterns of terrestrial vertebrate species richness on the Brazilian Cerrado

New indices of the historical environmental stability that underlies palynological data presented here show how much the climate and vegetation has changed over the late Quaternary, and tests the relationships between climate stability and the current patterns of terrestrial vertebrate species richness on the Brazilian Cerrado. Three historical environmental stability indices have been developed from palynological studies available in the primary literature. Correlation analyses were used to quantify the strength of the relationships among the three historical stability indices, as well as between the indices, species richness, and the latitudes of pollen-based records. The three historical stability indices are positively related to one another in that they have strong and significant correlations in all cases. However, there is no meaningful correlation among the historical stability indices, species richness and latitude. The new indices are spatially concordant throughout the Brazilian Cerrado, revealing that palynological data are efficient datasets with which to assess the climate stability during the late Quaternary, but they do not support the historical hypothesis that higher environmental stability allows a greater accumulation of species. Environmental stability as an underlying mechanism responsible for the maintenance of the broad-scale latitudinal gradients in species richness is not supported for the terrestrial vertebrates of the Brazilian Cerrado.