On mammal diversity and vegetation biomass

Two global maps coincidentally turned up almost side-by-side on Twitter this weekend. Interesting in their own right individually, they threw up a question for me when I was forced to look at them together in my feed. A paper in Diversity and Distributions mapped what the diversity of large mammals would look like if not for what humans have wrought. Here it is.

Fig 1: The natural diversity of large mammals is shown as it would appear without the impact of modern man. The figure shows the variation in the number of large mammals (>45kg) that would have occurred per 100x100km grid cell. The numbers on the scale indicate the number of species. Credit: Soren Faurby.

And a paper in Global Change Biology mapped above-ground vegetation biomass across the tropics.

"We combined two existing datasets of vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2011, 9899; Nature Climate Change, 2, 2012, 182) into a pan-tropical AGB map at 1-km resolution ." — “We combined two existing datasets of vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2011, 9899; Nature Climate Change, 2, 2012, 182) into a pan-tropical AGB map at 1-km resolution.”

So my question is this: why does high-biomass vegetation support a relatively large diversity of mammals in SE Asia, but not in tropical Africa or South America?

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