Species traits shape the relationship between local and regional species abundance distributions

Abstract The species abundance distribution (SAD) depicts the relative abundance of species within a community, which is a key concept in ecology. Here, we test whether SADs are more likely to either follow a lognormal‐like or follow a logseries‐like distribution and how that may change with spatial scale. Our results show that the shape of SADs changes from logseries‐like at small, plot scales to lognormal‐like at large, landscape scales. However, the rate at which the SAD's shape changes also depends on species traits linked to the spatial distribution of individuals. Specifically, we show for oligophagous and small macro‐moth species that a logseries distribution is more likely at small scales and a lognormal distribution is more likely at large scales, whereas the logseries distribution fits well at both small and large scales for polyphagous and large species. We also show that SAD moments scale as power laws as a function of spatial scale, and we assess the performance of Tchebichef moments and polynomials to reconstruct SADs at the landscape scale from information at local scales. Overall, the method performed well and reproduced the shapes of the empirical distributions