Life Sciences Commons^™

Evidence For A General Species Time Arearelationship, P. B. Adler, Ethan P. White, W. K. Lauenroth, D. M. Kaufman, A. Rassweiler, J. A. Rusak

Biology Faculty Publications

The species-area relationship (SAR) plays a central role in biodiversity research, and recent work has increased awareness of its temporal analog, the species-time relationship (STR). Here we provide evidence for a general species-time-area-relationship (STAR), in which species number is a function of the area and time span of sampling, as well as their interaction. For eight assemblages ranging from lake zooplankton to desert rodents, this model outperformed a sampling-based model and two simpler models in which area and time had independent effects. In every case the interaction term was negative, meaning that rates of species accumulation in space decreased with …