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      Putting Beta-Diversity on the Map: Broad-Scale Congruence and Coincidence in the Extremes

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          Abstract

          Beta-diversity, the change in species composition between places, is a critical but poorly understood component of biological diversity. Patterns of beta-diversity provide information central to many ecological and evolutionary questions, as well as to conservation planning. Yet beta-diversity is rarely studied across large extents, and the degree of similarity of patterns among taxa at such scales remains untested. To our knowledge, this is the first broad-scale analysis of cross-taxon congruence in beta-diversity, and introduces a new method to map beta-diversity continuously across regions. Congruence between amphibian, bird, and mammal beta-diversity in the Western Hemisphere varies with both geographic location and spatial extent. We demonstrate that areas of high beta-diversity for the three taxa largely coincide, but areas of low beta-diversity exhibit little overlap. These findings suggest that similar processes lead to high levels of differentiation in amphibian, bird, and mammal assemblages, while the ecological and biogeographic factors influencing homogeneity in vertebrate assemblages vary. Knowledge of beta-diversity congruence can help formulate hypotheses about the mechanisms governing regional diversity patterns and should inform conservation, especially as threat from global climate change increases.

          Author Summary

          Beta-diversity—how species composition varies from place to place—is a fundamental attribute of biodiversity. However, despite its recognized importance, beta-diversity is rarely studied across large spatial scales. Here we use a new method to compare amphibian, bird, and mammal beta-diversity across large regions within the Western Hemisphere. We show that although the areas of low beta-diversity are different for the three groups, areas of high beta-diversity largely coincide. Moreover, we find that the degree to which the groups exhibit similar patterns of beta-diversity depends on the geographic location and extent at which it is measured. Beta-diversity is high where species are most susceptible to climate change, such as in areas with complex topography or high environmental variation. Identifying where areas of high beta-diversity coincide for different species groups is essential to the design of effective protected area networks.

          Abstract

          A new method to compare amphibian, bird, and mammal beta-diversity within the Western Hemisphere reveals that areas of high beta-diversity coincide, with implications for understanding regional diversity patterns and for conservation.

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          Beta-diversity in tropical forest trees.

          The high alpha-diversity of tropical forests has been amply documented, but beta-diversity-how species composition changes with distance-has seldom been studied. We present quantitative estimates of beta-diversity for tropical trees by comparing species composition of plots in lowland terra firme forest in Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. We compare observations with predictions derived from a neutral model in which habitat is uniform and only dispersal and speciation influence species turnover. We find that beta-diversity is higher in Panama than in western Amazonia and that patterns in both areas are inconsistent with the neutral model. In Panama, habitat variation appears to increase species turnover relative to Amazonia, where unexpectedly low turnover over great distances suggests that population densities of some species are bounded by as yet unidentified processes. At intermediate scales in both regions, observations can be matched by theory, suggesting that dispersal limitation, with speciation, influences species turnover.
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            Global hotspots of species richness are not congruent with endemism or threat.

            Biodiversity hotspots have a prominent role in conservation biology, but it remains controversial to what extent different types of hotspot are congruent. Previous studies were unable to provide a general answer because they used a single biodiversity index, were geographically restricted, compared areas of unequal size or did not quantitatively compare hotspot types. Here we use a new global database on the breeding distribution of all known extant bird species to test for congruence across three types of hotspot. We demonstrate that hotspots of species richness, threat and endemism do not show the same geographical distribution. Only 2.5% of hotspot areas are common to all three aspects of diversity, with over 80% of hotspots being idiosyncratic. More generally, there is a surprisingly low overall congruence of biodiversity indices, with any one index explaining less than 24% of variation in the other indices. These results suggest that, even within a single taxonomic class, different mechanisms are responsible for the origin and maintenance of different aspects of diversity. Consequently, the different types of hotspots also vary greatly in their utility as conservation tools.
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              Dispersal, environment, and floristic variation of western Amazonian forests.

              The distribution of plant species, the species compositions of different sites, and the factors that affect them in tropical rain forests are not well understood. The main hypotheses are that species composition is either (i) uniform over large areas, (ii) random but spatially autocorrelated because of dispersal limitation, or (iii) patchy and environmentally determined. Here we test these hypotheses, using a large data set from western Amazonia. The uniformity hypothesis gains no support, but the other hypotheses do. Environmental determinism explains a larger proportion of the variation in floristic differences between sites than does dispersal limitation; together, these processes explain 70 to 75% of the variation. Consequently, it is important that management planning for conservation and resource use take into account both habitat heterogeneity and biogeographic differences.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                PLoS Biol
                pbio
                PLoS Biology
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1544-9173
                1545-7885
                October 2007
                9 October 2007
                : 5
                : 10
                : e272
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Curriculum in Ecology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
                [2 ] Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
                [3 ] Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
                [4 ] IUCN/SSC–CI/CABS Biodiversity Assessment Unit, Conservation International, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
                [5 ] Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America
                [6 ] Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America
                [7 ] World Land Trust–US, Deerfield, New Hampshire, United States of America
                Imperial College London, United Kingdom
                Author notes
                * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: meghan.mcknight@ 123456gmail.com
                Article
                06-PLBI-RA-0803R4 plbi-05-10-19
                10.1371/journal.pbio.0050272
                2001212
                17927449
                4d64e980-cdf2-41b5-b4a4-a74d1267c34c
                Copyright: © 2007 McKnight et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 15 May 2006
                : 17 August 2007
                Page count
                Pages: 9
                Categories
                Research Article
                Ecology
                Evolutionary Biology
                Custom metadata
                McKnight MW, White PS, McDonald RI, Lamoreux JF, Sechrest W, et al. (2007) Putting beta-diversity on the map: Broad-scale congruence and coincidence in the extremes. PLoS Biol 5(10): e272. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050272

                Life sciences
                Life sciences

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