Response to comment on "Interspecific competition limits bird species' ranges on tropical mountains"

Xing et al. (1) create new variables and fit models to argue against the hypothesis that interspecific competition shapes species' elevational ranges. However, their key newly created variable is best interpreted as a proxy for the important variable of the interspecific competition hypothesis. Thus, their reanalysis uncovers the patterns we already described that are consistent with the interspecific competition hypothesis.