Light detection and ranging explains diversity of plants, fungi, lichens, and bryophytes across multiple habitats and large geographic extent

Abstract

Effective planning and nature management require spatially accurate and comprehensive measures of the factors important for biodiversity. Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) can provide exactly this, and is therefore a promising technology to support future nature management and related applications. However, until now studies evaluating the potential of LIDAR for this field have been highly limited in scope. Here, we assess the potential of LIDAR to estimate the local diversity of four species groups in multiple habitat types, from open grasslands and meadows over shrubland to forests and across a large area (~43,000 km2), providing a crucial step toward enabling the application of LIDAR in practice, planning, and policy‐making. We assessed the relationships between the species richness of macrofungi, lichens, bryophytes, and plants, respectively, and 25 LIDAR‐based measures related to potential abiotic and biotic diversity drivers. We used negative binomial generalized linear modeling to construct 19 different candidate models for each species group, and leave‐one‐region‐out cross validation to select the best models. These best models explained 49%, 31%, 32%, and 28% of the variation in species richness (R 2) for macrofungi, lichens, bryophytes, and plants, respectively. Three LIDAR measures, terrain slope, shrub layer height and variation in local heat load, were important and positively related to the richness in three of the four species groups. For at least one of the species groups, four other LIDAR measures, shrub layer density, medium‐tree layer density, and variations in point amplitude and in relative biomass, were among the three most important. Generally, LIDAR measures exhibited strong associations to the biotic environment, and to some abiotic factors, but were poor measures of spatial landscape and temporal habitat continuity. In conclusion, we showed how well LIDAR alone can predict the local biodiversity across habitats. We also showed that several LIDAR measures are highly correlated to important biodiversity drivers, which are notoriously hard to measure in the field. This opens up hitherto unseen possibilities for using LIDAR for cost‐effective monitoring and management of local biodiversity across species groups and habitat types even over large areas.

Multi‐taxon inventory reveals highly consistent biodiversity responses to ecospace variation

“…While land‐use change is identified at a global scale as the most important present and future driver of biodiversity loss in terrestrial and freshwater systems (Titeux et al , Díaz et al ), there is less agreement about the underlying causes for variation in biodiversity. Most models and theories of biodiversity refer to specific taxonomic groups and ecosystems (Fagerström and Westoby , Lawton , Blaxter et al , Brunbjerg et al , Jepson et al , Moeslund et al ), leaving us with no general rules and ecological theories of variation in local diversity and without prioritization tools at the local spatial scales where practical conservation planning and management takes place. Several studies have investigated the potential for using selected species groups to represent the wider conservation interests, but based on a global meta‐analysis Westgate et al () concluded that the data undermines the assumption that a taxonomic subset can represent the wider biodiversity.…”

“…We applied the recently proposed ecospace framework (Brunbjerg et al , , , Jepson et al , Moeslund et al ) for a formal and structured quantification of environmental variation. Ecospace represents the total environment in space and time, in which the individual (species) colonizes, grows, reproduces and dies or goes extinct.…”

Relationships between macro-fungal dark diversity and habitat parameters using LiDAR

“…The dataset was collected from a national biodiversity inventory in Denmark as part of the "Biowide" research project (Brunbjerg et al 2019). A total of 130 study sites (40 × 40 m) were selected with a minimum distance of 500 m between each to reduce spatial covariance with 30 sites allocated to cultivated habitats and 100 sites to natural habitats ( Figure 1).…”

“…The "Biowide" dataset also includes a subset of 10 sites (two in each region) of hotspots for different taxonomic groups in Denmark, which were selected by voting amongst active naturalists in the Danish conservation and management societies. For further details on the design and data collection procedures see Brunbjerg et al (2019).…”

Multi-taxon inventory reveals highly consistent biodiversity responses to ecospace variation

“…We applied the recently proposed ecospace framework (2–4, 10, 11) for a formal and structured quantification of environmental variation. Ecospace represents the total environment in space and time, in which the individual (species) colonizes, grows, reproduces, and dies or goes extinct.…”