scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

How Should Beta-Diversity Inform Biodiversity Conservation?

Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
How beta-diversity is impacted by human activities, including farming, selective logging, urbanization, species invasions, overhunting, and climate change is reviewed.
Abstract
To design robust protected area networks, accurately measure species losses, or understand the processes that maintain species diversity, conservation science must consider the organization of biodiversity in space. Central is beta-diversity--the component of regional diversity that accumulates from compositional differences between local species assemblages. We review how beta-diversity is impacted by human activities, including farming, selective logging, urbanization, species invasions, overhunting, and climate change. Beta-diversity increases, decreases, or remains unchanged by these impacts, depending on the balance of processes that cause species composition to become more different (biotic heterogenization) or more similar (biotic homogenization) between sites. While maintaining high beta-diversity is not always a desirable conservation outcome, understanding beta-diversity is essential for protecting regional diversity and can directly assist conservation planning.

read more

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Trade-offs between multifunctionality and profit in tropical smallholder landscapes

TL;DR: Landscape compositions that can mitigate trade-offs under optimal land-use allocation but also show that intensive monocultures always lead to higher profits are identified, suggesting that targeted landscape planning is needed to increase land- use efficiency while ensuring socio-ecological sustainability.
Journal ArticleDOI

β-Diversity, Community Assembly, and Ecosystem Functioning

TL;DR: It is highlighted here the crucial role of β-diversity - a hitherto underexplored facet of biodiversity - for a better process-level understanding of biodiversity change and its consequences for ecosystems.
Journal ArticleDOI

A meta-analysis of nestedness and turnover components of beta diversity across organisms and ecosystems

TL;DR: Examination of species traits, spatial extent, latitude and ecosystem type on the nestedness and turnover components of beta diversity provides evidence that species turnover, being consistently the larger component of total beta diversity, and nestedness are related to the latitude of the study area and intrinsic organismal features.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?

TL;DR: Differences between fossil and modern data and the addition of recently available palaeontological information influence understanding of the current extinction crisis, and results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record.
Journal ArticleDOI

Urbanization as a major cause of biotic homogenization

TL;DR: In this paper, a basic conservation challenge is that urban biota is often quite diverse and very abundant, and that, because so many urban species are immigrants adapting to city habitats, urbanites of all income levels become increasingly disconnected from local indigenous species and their natural ecosystems.
Journal ArticleDOI

Defaunation in the Anthropocene

TL;DR: Defaunation is both a pervasive component of the planet’s sixth mass extinction and also a major driver of global ecological change.
Journal ArticleDOI

Partitioning the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity

TL;DR: In this paper, a unified framework for the assessment of beta diversity, disentangling the contribution of spatial turnover and nestedness to beta-diversity patterns, is provided, which is crucial for our understanding of central biogeographic, ecological and conservation issues.
Journal ArticleDOI

The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection

TL;DR: The biodiversity of eukaryote species and their extinction rates, distributions, and protection is reviewed, and what the future rates of species extinction will be, how well protected areas will slow extinction Rates, and how the remaining gaps in knowledge might be filled are reviewed.
Related Papers (5)