Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Measurement Of Biodiversity (Mob): A Method To Separate The Scale-Dependent Effects Of Species Abundance Distribution, Density, And Aggregation On Diversity Change, Daniel J. Mcglinn, Xiao Xiao, Felix May, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Thore Engel, Shane A. Blowes, Tiffany M. Knight, Oliver Purschke, Jonathan M. Chase, Brian J. Mcgill

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Little consensus has emerged regarding how proximate and ultimate drivers such as productivity, disturbance and temperature may affect species richness and other aspects of biodiversity. Part of the confusion is that most studies examine species richness at a single spatial scale and ignore how the underlying components of species richness can vary with spatial scale. We provide an approach for the measurement of biodiversity that decomposes changes in species rarefaction curves into proximate components attributed to: (a) the species abundance distribution, (b) density of individuals and (c) the spatial arrangement of individuals. We decompose species richness by comparing spatial and …