title: Prediction uncertainty of environmental change effects on temperate European biodiversity.
abstract: Observed patterns of species richness at landscape scale (gamma diversity) cannot always be attributed to a specific set of explanatory variables, but rather different alternative explanatory statistical models of similar quality may exist. Therefore predictions of the effects of environmental change (such as in climate or land cover) on biodiversity may differ considerably, depending on the chosen set of explanatory variables. Here we use multimodel prediction to evaluate effects of climate, land-use intensity and landscape structure on species richness in each of seven groups of organisms (plants, birds, spiders, wild bees, ground beetles, true bugs and hoverflies) in temperate Europe. We contrast this approach with traditional best-model predictions, which we show, using cross-validation, to have inferior prediction accuracy. Multimodel inference changed the importance of some environmental variables in comparison with the best model, and accordingly gave deviating predictions for environmental change effects. Overall, prediction uncertainty for the multimodel approach was only slightly higher than that of the best model, and absolute changes in predicted species richness were also comparable. Richness predictions varied generally more for the impact of climate change than for land-use change at the coarse scale of our study. Overall, our study indicates that the uncertainty introduced to environmental change predictions through uncertainty in model selection both qualitatively and quantitatively affects species richness projections.
authors: Computational Landscape Ecology, UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany. carsten.dormann@ufz.de
authors: Carsten F
authors: CF
authors: Dormann
authors: Oliver
authors: O
authors: Schweiger
authors: P
authors: P
authors: Arens
authors: I
authors: I
authors: Augenstein
authors: St
authors: S
authors: Aviron
authors: Debra
authors: D
authors: Bailey
authors: J
authors: J
authors: Baudry
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Billeter
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Bugter
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Bukácek
authors: F
authors: F
authors: Burel
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Cerny
authors: Raphaël De
authors: RD
authors: Cock
authors: Geert
authors: G
authors: De Blust
authors: R
authors: R
authors: DeFilippi
authors: Tim
authors: T
authors: Diekötter
authors: J
authors: J
authors: Dirksen
authors: W
authors: W
authors: Durka
authors: P J
authors: PJ
authors: Edwards
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Frenzel
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Hamersky
authors: Frederik
authors: F
authors: Hendrickx
authors: F
authors: F
authors: Herzog
authors: St
authors: S
authors: Klotz
authors: B
authors: B
authors: Koolstra
authors: A
authors: A
authors: Lausch
authors: D
authors: D
authors: Le Coeur
authors: J
authors: J
authors: Liira
authors: J P
authors: JP
authors: Maelfait
authors: P
authors: P
authors: Opdam
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Roubalova
authors: Agnes
authors: A
authors: Schermann-Legionnet
authors: N
authors: N
authors: Schermann
authors: T
authors: T
authors: Schmidt
authors: M J M
authors: MJ
authors: Smulders
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Speelmans
authors: P
authors: P
authors: Simova
authors: J
authors: J
authors: Verboom
authors: Walter
authors: W
authors: van Wingerden
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Zobel
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001181:Arthropods; D044822:Biodiversity; D001717:Birds; D002980:Climate; D004777:Environment; D005060:Europe; D005843:Geography; D008954:Models, Biological; D010944:Plants