title: How Should Beta-Diversity Inform Biodiversity Conservation?
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. Electronic address: jacob.socolar@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jacob B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Socolar
authors.affiliation: School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
authors.forename: James J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Gilroy
authors.affiliation: School of Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
authors.forename: William E
authors.initials: WE
authors.lastname: Kunin
authors.affiliation: Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Electronic address: david.edwards@sheffield.ac.uk.
authors.forename: David P
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Edwards
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods; D044822:Biodiversity; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D016468:Forestry / Q000379:methods; D058865:Introduced Species; D062206:Spatial Analysis; D014507:Urbanization
keywords: alpha-diversity; beta-diversity; biodiversity conservation; biotic homogenization; diversity partitioning; gamma-diversity; pairwise dissimilarities; spatial scaling; species–area relationships