Biodiversity change is uncoupled from species richness trends: Consequences for conservation and monitoring

By H. Hillebrand, Bernd Blasius, Elizabeth T. Borer, Jonathan M. Chase, J. Downing, B. K. Eriksson, Chris T. Filstrup, W. Stanley Harpole, Dorothee Hodapp, Stefano Larsen and 4 more. 2018

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with international policy seeking to conserve biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions. Quantifying the trends in biodiversity is far from trivial, however, as recently documented by meta-analyses, which report little if any net change in local species richness through time. Here, we summarise several limitations of species richness as a metric of biodiversity change and show that the expectation of directional species richness trends under changing conditions is invalid. Instead, we illustrate how a set of species turnover indices provide more information content regarding temporal trends in biodiversity, as they reflect how dominance and identity shift in communities over time. We apply these metrics to three monitoring datasets representing different ecosystem types. In all datasets, nearly complete species turnover occurred, but this was disconnected from any species richness trends. Instead, turnover was strongly influenced by changes in species presence (identities) and dominance (abundances). We further show that these metrics can detect phases of strong compositional shifts in monitoring data and thus identify a different aspect of biodiversity change decoupled from species richness. Synthesis and applications: Temporal trends in species richness are insufficient to capture key changes in biodiversity in changing environments. In fact, reductions in environmental quality can lead to transient increases in species richness if immigration or extinction has different temporal dynamics. Thus, biodiversity monitoring programmes need to go beyond analyses of trends in richness in favour of more meaningful assessments of biodiversity change.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a0c0a705d19ce96af645559c9a9187ae704c0d9

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In Ecological Modeling

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Citations in the corpus

Is local biodiversity declining or not? A summary of the debate over analysis of species richness time trends (2018, background): “…data syntheses has taken a di ﬀ erent approach in which researchers have collated time-series data from studies that have made repeated measurements of biodiversity at individual locations around the planet (Dornelas et al., 2014; Elahi et al., 2015; Hillebrand et al., 2018; Vellend et al., 2013).”
Plant functional diversity modulates global environmental change effects on grassland productivity (2018, background): “The need for the trait-based approach is further necessitated by the fact that environmental changes may cause species turnover without influencing species diversity (Avolio et al. 2014; Jones, Ripplinger & Collins 2017; Hillebrand et al. 2018), which can be readily captured by changes in functional”
Geographical, temporal and taxonomic biases in insect GBIF data on biodiversity and extinction (2021, methodology): “Nevertheless, it is still possible to correct the data to reduce spatial sampling biases (Dornelas et al., 2013; Vellend et al., 2013; Hillebrand et al., 2018).”