Applying zeta diversity to understand species turnover patterns of small mammals in the Mountains of Southwest China

DEAR EDITOR,Mountainous regions are generally characterized by high species turnover, yet studies applying novel conceptual frameworks to analyze the spatial structure and organization of montane biota along elevational gradients remain scarce.Based on the zeta diversity framework—a novel turnover metric that focuses on average number of species shared across sites — and a comprehensive presence-absence dataset of small mammals collected from 22 elevational gradients in the Mountains of Southwest China（MSC）,