Geodiversity inclusiveness in biodiversity assessment

Abstract

Biodiversity assessment is constitutive in establishing conservation priorities and outcomes, and geodiversity complements species richness as a surrogate in the absence of species data, improves statistical modelling and can facilitate prediction of species distribution and abundance. Yet, geodiversity is frequently excluded, and biodiversity prioritised in conservation endeavours such as ecosystem-based management. Therefore, combined geodiversity and biodiversity assessment approaches present practical benefits to conservation such as improved collaboration between biologists and geoscientists, efficacious indicators of conservation value, and abatement of biodiversity partialities and wider inclusion of geodiversity in conservation literature. This study scientometrically analysed 240 biodiversity assessment publications to investigate geodiversity inclusiveness, methodological trends, geographic trends, environment-type trends and future directions in biodiversity assessment methods. Results showed these species richness articles frequently included geodiversity-relevant terms such as hydrological, soil, geological and geomorphological components, but the all-encompassing ‘geodiversity’ term was absent entirely. Geographic trends showed many potential economic, social, cultural and political factors influencing geodiversity inclusiveness in biodiversity assessment. For example, Australia’s relatively resource exploitative approach to geology and early involvement in the inception of the geodiversity concept could explain the high frequency of geological-related terms in Australian biodiversity assessments. Methodological trends showed dominance by field-based biodiversity assessments such as trapping methods, followed transects, quadrats, net methods and observations. Given the specific sample size of literature analysed, inferences from this study relate only to biodiversity assessment methods and not biodiversity discourse in its entirety. Subsequent research could investigate specific factors, such as social, economic or political, and their influence on geodiversity inclusiveness in biodiversity assessment methods.

Geodiversity and Biodiversity to Delimit Natural Protected Areas. Examples From the Jaén Province (Southern Spain)

“…This correlation between those partial indices of geodiversity and biodiversity is also detected between the geodiversity and biodiversity indices, which shows a potential dependence between both parameters. This was already explained by Parks and Mulligan (2010), Tukiainen et al (2016) or Crisp et al (2022). These authors postulated that geological factors (lithology, geomorphology, hydrology, pedology processes) condition the development of ecosystems and thus the colonization of new habitats.…”

Too much diversity—Multiple definitions of geodiversity hinder its potential in biodiversity research

“…Along with many researchers studying geodiversity and biodiversity (Boothroyd & McHenry, 2019;Crisp et al, 2023), we suggest that Gray's (2013) definition and terminology should be used consistently when bringing geodiversity into biodiversity research. We also recommend clearly communicating which components of geodiversity-all or some-from Gray's (2013) definition are included in biodiversity studies, as has been suggested in relation to ecosystem services (Fox et al, 2020).…”

“…As many of the components included in the proposed geodiversity definition have been explored independently in ecology (e.g. hydrological diversity, Lawson et al, 2015;soil diversity, Stark et al, 2017;geological diversity, Antonelli et al, 2018), there is an opportunity to integrate and synthesize this research with existing research linking biodiversity and geodiversity (Crisp et al, 2023).…”

“…For instance, geodiversity is sometimes equated with the full range of environmental heterogeneity, or it includes biotic components (Wallis et al., 2022) or climate variation (Parks & Mulligan, 2010; Zarnetske et al., 2019). On the other hand, geodiversity is sometimes considered as a synonym for a single abiotic variable or its heterogeneity (such as a single geological feature or topographical heterogeneity; Crisp et al., 2023) or is thought to cover only the subsurface (van Ree & van Beukering, 2016). Currently, different definitions of geodiversity make it difficult to compare the growing number of studies on geodiversity and biodiversity.…”

Geodiversity as a potential indicator of stream health in ecological quality assessment systems

“…A relatively simple approach for assessing the in‐stream geodiversity is to count the richness of the physical, hydrological and geomorphological features (Hjort & Luoto, 2010; Kärnä et al, 2018) in situ. Such approaches have been used in studies that attempt to explore the relationships between geodiversity and biodiversity (Heino et al, 2019; Toivanen et al, 2019; Tukiainen et al, 2019) and ultimately promote biodiversity conservation actions through the protection of the abiotic environment (Alahuhta et al, 2018; Crisp et al, 2022; Hjort et al, 2022). However, studies that investigate whether geodiversity metrics can be used as proxies for ecological quality of freshwater ecosystems are still lacking.…”