Quantifying spatiotemporal drivers of environmental heterogeneity in Kruger National Park, South Africa

Context: Environmental heterogeneity is considered an important mechanism of biodiversity. How environmental heterogeneity is characterised by the compositional, structural and functional variation of biotic and abiotic components is a central research theme in conservation. Objectives: We explore how environmental heterogeneity relates to the underlying physical landscape template and how that relationship changes over space and time. We examine how, in some areas, environmental heterogeneity may also be driven by dynamic ecological processes, and how this relates to patterns of plant species richness. Method: We use local geographically weighted regression to spatially partition environmental heterogeneity, measured as Landsat spectral variance, into the portion explained by stable physical landscape properties (R