Understanding the neutral, biological, and environmental processes driving species distributions is valuable in informing conservation efforts because it will help us predict how species will respond to changes in environmental conditions. Environmental processes affect species differently according to their biological traits, which determine how they interact with their environment. Therefore, functional, trait-based modeling approaches are considered important for predicting distributions and species responses to change but even for data-rich primate communities our understanding of the relationships between traits and environmental conditions is limited. Here we use a large-scale, high-resolution data set of African diurnal primate distributions, biological traits, and environmental conditions to investigate the role of biological traits and environmental trait filtering in primate distributions. We collected data from published sources for 354 sites and 14 genera with 57 species across sub-Saharan Africa. We then combined a three-table ordination method, RLQ, with the fourth-corner approach to test relationships between environmental variables and biological traits and used a mapping approach to visually assess patterning in primate genus and species’ distributions. We found no significant relationships between any groups of environmental variables and biological traits, despite a clear role of environmental filtering in driving genus and species’ distributions. The most important environmental driver of species distributions was temperature seasonality, followed by rainfall. We conclude that the relative flexibility of many primate genera means that not any one particular set of traits drives their species–environment associations, despite the clear role of such associations in their distribution patterns.

了解推动物种分布的中性，生物和环境过程对于告知保护工作非常有价值，因为它将帮助我们预测物种对环境条件变化的反应。环境过程根据物种的生物学特性对物种的影响不同，而生物学特性决定了物种与环境的相互作用方式。因此，基于功能的基于特征的建模方法被认为对于预测分布和物种对变化的响应非常重要，但是即使对于数据丰富的灵长类动物群落，我们对特征与环境条件之间关系的理解也很有限。在这里，我们使用了非洲昼夜灵长类动物分布，生物学特征，和环境条件，研究生物学特征和环境特征过滤在灵长类动物分布中的作用。我们从撒哈拉以南非洲地区的354个站点和14个属的57个物种的已公开来源收集了数据。然后，我们将三表排序方法RLQ与第四角方法相结合，以测试环境变量与生物学特性之间的关系，并使用映射方法直观地评估灵长类和物种分布的模式。尽管环境过滤在驱动属和物种分布中起着明显的作用，但我们发现任何组的环境变量和生物学特性之间都没有显着的关系。物种分布最重要的环境驱动因素是温度季节性，其次是降雨。