Ecologists have long studied how species numbers are distributed along environmental gradients. Typically, plotting species’ abundance along a single gradient result in a polygonal point cloud, because species do not reach their maximum potential abundance at every location. The upper limit of these abundance-environment plots represents locations where the maximum abundance of the species is limited by the measured environmental variable and may be explained by the Law of the Minimum (LoM). We examine the generality of polygon-shaped plots in abundance-environment relationships and assess how often they are interpreted in the context of the LoM. Our approach combined a literature review with an analysis of observational data. Initially, we examined the prevalence of polygonal patterns in abundance-environment plots in the literature and analyzed how frequently these patterns are conceptually linked to the LoM. Additionally, we assessed the prevalence of polygon-shaped patterns in abundance-environment relationships across 186 tree and 114 bird species in North America using a novel method that discriminates polygon-shaped plots in observational data. We also developed upper quantile regressions (QR) to illustrate how to model the influence of water balance and energy on the maximum potential abundances of trees and birds. Our results revealed polygonal plots in 76% of reviewed studies and in 73% of the 300 analyzed tree and bird species. We demonstrate that polygonal shapes with upper limits are prevalent in abundance-environment plots; yet they are rarely interpreted considering the Law of the Minimum. We conclude that a wider acknowledgement of limiting relationships would improve our ecological understanding and estimation with further benefits to theoretical and applied ecology.