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.
Highlights
Beta-diversity, the change in species composition between places, represents the differentiation component of diversity, as opposed to the inventory component, which describes the species composition of a single place [1,2,3]
Congruence in beta-diversity of three groups of terrestrial vertebrates is highly dependent on the geographic location and extent of analysis, reflecting taxonomic and regional variation in the influence of large-scale historical processes and environmental factors [4,7,10,14,15]
Our results show that correlations in amphibian, bird, and mammal bsim-d measured at small extents vary in strength throughout the Western Hemisphere, congruence is generally stronger within the Neotropical realm than within the Nearctic
Summary
Beta-diversity, the change in species composition between places, represents the differentiation component of diversity, as opposed to the inventory component, which describes the species composition of a single place [1,2,3]. As beta-diversity quantifies the change, or turnover, in species across space, it is central to a wide array of ecological and evolutionary topics, such as the scaling of diversity [16,17,18,19], the delineation of biotic regions or biotic transitions [20,21], and the mechanisms through which regional biotas are formed [15,20,21,22]. Including turnover estimates in area selection algorithms captures variation in species assemblages, which helps to preserve ecological and evolutionary processes as well as underlying environmental heterogeneity necessary for long-term persistence [28,31].
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