Abstract
Quantifying species turnover is an important aspect of biodiversity monitoring. Turnover measures are usually based on species presence/absence data, reflecting the rate at which species are replaced. However, measures that reflect the rate at which individuals of a species are replaced by individuals of another species are far more sensitive to change. In this paper, we propose families of turnover measures that reflect changes in species proportions. We study the properties of our measures, and use simulation to assess their success in detecting turnover. Using data on the British farmland bird community from the breeding bird survey, we evaluate our measures to quantify temporal turnover and how it varies across the British mainland.
Highlights
Perhaps appropriately, there is a great diversity of measures for quantifying biodiversity (Pielou 1975; Krebs 1989; Magurran 2004)
This paper concentrates on temporal turnover, which we define as the change in species proportions over time, taking into account species identity
The Bhattacharyya divergence measure is usually referred to as a similarity measure of two probability distributions, we find that it can be derived as the angle in the positive sphere S+K −1 between transformed species proportion vectors
Summary
There is a great diversity of measures for quantifying biodiversity (Pielou 1975; Krebs 1989; Magurran 2004). Whether spatial or temporal, is about assessing the changes between two species compositions, and such change is measured by dissimilarity, which is referred to as differentiation, divergence or distance in different scientific fields, such as probability theory, mathematical geology and cluster analysis. We propose four different families of turnover measure, all of which can be used to quantify either spatial or temporal change in diversity. If available, it is more informative to use species abundance distributions to measure the compositional change over time (Magurran 2010). Harrison et al (2014) fitted models to these data to allow estimation of abundance in any 1 km square on the British mainland for any species with adequate data We use those estimates for farmland species to estimate temporal turnover in the British farmland bird community, and study how it varies spatially. The BBS data are available through the British Trust for Ornithology’s standard data request procedure (see http://www. bto.org/research-data-services/data-services/data-and-informationpolicy)
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