We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Would environmental diversity be a good surrogate for species diversity?
- Authors
Araújo, m.; Humphries, C.J.; densham, P.J.; Lampinen, R.; Hagemeijer, W.J.M.; Mitchell-Jones, A.J.; Gasc, J.P.
- Abstract
Representative conservation area-networks are needed to ensure persistence of species diversity within regions. Frequently, however, there are neither resources nor time to carry out detailed inventories before areas are selected. Consequently, areas may be chosen using information other than species. One promising approach is to represent asmuch environmental variation as possible (environmental diversity, ED) as a surrogate for species diversity (e.g. UNESCO 1974, DeVellice et al. 1988; Belbin 1993; Faith and Walker 1996a). This would achievegreat economies in all sectors, if true. So far no formal empirical tests have been made to assess the performance of environmental diversity as a surrogate for species diversity. Indeed, a positive relationship between these two measures has often been assumed rather than estimated. For example Pressey et al. (1996) and Woinarski et al. (1996) asked whether reserve networks sampled representative portions of environmental variation, but did not question whether this would represent biodiversity at a rate higher than expected by chance. We test this idea using species and environmental data for Europe. The p-median location-allocation model was applied to select representative portions of environmental-space (Faith and Walker 1996a,b). The consequences of this selection are compared to those of choosing areas at random and to solutions using an optimising area-selection algorithm (hotspots of complementarity). We show that ED does not always representspecies at a rate consistently higher than that expected by chance, let alone approximate to that of the optimising solution. This is because particular distributions among restricted-range size species do not fit the underlying assumptions of the ED model. With these data, ED is a poor predictor of species diversity.
- Subjects
BIODEGRADATION; SPECIES diversity; MODELING (Sculpture); CONSERVATION of natural resources; ECOLOGY
- Publication
Ecography, 2001, Vol 24, Issue 1, p103
- ISSN
0906-7590
- Publication type
Article