Species richness change across spatial scales

By Jonathan M. Chase, Brian J. McGill, P. Thompson, L. Antão, A. E. Bates, S. Blowes, M. Dornelas, Andrew Gonzalez, Anne E. Magurran, S. Supp and 15 more. Oikos, 2019

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

3 Humans have elevated global extinction rates and thus lowered global-scale species richness. 4 However, there is no a priori reason to expect that losses of global species richness should 5 always, or even often, trickle down to losses of species richness at regional and local scales, 6 even though this relationship is often assumed. Here, we show that scale can modulate our 7 estimates of species richness change through time in the face of anthropogenic pressures, but 8 not in a unidirectional way. Instead, the magnitude of species richness change through time can 9 increase, decrease, reverse, or be unimodal across spatial scales. Using several case studies, 10 we show different forms of scale-dependent richness change through time in the face of 11 anthropogenic pressures. For example, Central American corals show a homogenization 12 pattern, where small scale richness is largely unchanged through time, while larger scale 13 richness change is highly negative. Alternatively, birds in North America showed a differentiation 14 effect, where species richness was again largely unchanged through time at small scales, but 15 was more positive at larger scales. Finally, we collated data from a heterogeneous set of studies 16 of different taxa measured through time from sites ranging from small plots to entire continents, 17 and found highly variable patterns that nevertheless imply complex scale-dependence in several 18 taxa. In summary, understanding how biodiversity is changing in the Anthropocene requires an 19 explicit recognition of the influence of spatial scale, and we conclude with some 20 recommendations for how to better incorporate scale into our estimates of change. 21

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c90bb8b95983e17f5fcdc184217ebcd0ffb39d6

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In Ecology

  1. P. A. Henderson
  2. Anne E. Magurran
  3. M. Dornelas
  4. Faye Moyes
  5. E. Schupp
  6. S. Ostoja

In Global and Planetary Change

  1. Anne E. Magurran
  2. M. Dornelas

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

  1. M. Dornelas
  2. Faye Moyes
  3. Anne E. Magurran
  4. P. A. Henderson
  5. Jérôme Chave
  6. N. Andrew
  7. Lesley Hughes
  8. Brian J. McGill

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