Schuldt, Andreas

Wubet, Tesfaye

Buscot, François

Staab, Michael

Assmann, Thorsten

Böhnke-Kammerlander, Martin

Both, Sabine

Erfmeier, Alexandra

Klein, Alexandra-Maria

Ma, Keping

Pietsch, Katherina

Schultze, Sabrina

Wirth, Christian

Zhang, Jiayong

Zumstein, Pascale

Bruelheide, Helge

2015-12-10

Subtropical and tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, and untangling the spatial scaling of their diversity is fundamental for understanding global species richness and conserving biodiversity essential to human well-being. However, scale-dependent diversity distributions among coexisting taxa remain poorly understood for heterogeneous environments in biodiverse regions. We show that diversity relations among 43 taxa - including plants, arthropods and microorganisms - in a mountainous subtropical forest are highly nonlinear across spatial scales. Taxon-specific differences in β-diversity cause under- or overestimation of overall diversity by up to 50% when using surrogate taxa such as plants. Similar relationships may apply to half of all (sub)tropical forests - including major biodiversity hotspots - where high environmental heterogeneity causes high biodiversity and species turnover. Our study highlights that our general understanding of biodiversity patterns has to be improved - and that much larger areas will be required than in better-studied lowland forests - to reliably estimate biodiversity distributions and devise conservation strategies for the world's biodiverse regions.

Nature Communications, v.6, p. 1-8

2041-1723

26658136

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/30512

Nature Publishing Group

Attribution 4.0 International

Multitrophic diversity in a biodiverse forest is highly nonlinear across spatial scales

Journal Article

Publication