Rarity, Commonness, and the Contribution of Individual Species to Species Richness Patterns

Šizling, Arnošt L.; Šizlingová, Eva; Storch, David; Reif, Jiří; Gaston, Kevin J.

doi:10.1086/599305

Cited by 40 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…; Šizling et al . ). However, rarity in this study was expressed so as to emphasize the contribution of rare species (instead of using number proportions only) while reducing the effect of the abundant ones.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Spontaneous succession on opencast mining sites: implications for bird biodiversity

Šálek

2012

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Summary1. Remediation of lands devastated by industry includes various forms of restoration, such as technical reclamation and spontaneous succession. These management approaches are debated regarding conservation strategies for postindustrial landscapes. Mining areas consisting of early-to late-developmental stages of both reclaimed and unreclaimed sites offer an opportunity to examine the roles of restoration strategies in a complete successional series for biodiversity and disentangle the contributions of particular biotopes available at postindustrial sites. 2. Using linear models and multivariate analysis, I tested the effects of (a) developmental stages from early successional sites to mature forests, combined with (b) the initiation process at the sites, which was either technical reclamation or spontaneous succession, and (c) vegetation cover on (i) species richness, (ii) rarity and (iii) species composition of bird communities on 60 plots (100 9 100 m) within opencast mining areas in the lignite basin of north-western Czech Republic. 3. Bird communities were consistently more species rich on spontaneously developed sites compared with reclaimed sites throughout all stages of the succession series. Species richness increased with site age due to increasing habitat heterogeneity. 4. The conservation value of bird communities was generally lower on reclaimed sites than on spontaneously developed sites and decreased with site age. The most valuable communities developed on early successional sites and native shrublands, because these were inhabited by specialists that were scarce in the surrounding landscape. By contrast, technically reclaimed sites resulted in impoverished communities, usually with narrow spectra of common species. 5. Synthesis and applications. The results highlight the importance of spontaneously established sites and complete succession series for developing valuable bird communities in postindustrial areas such as opencast mining sites. In particular, early successional sites and shrublands create refuges for early successional specialists disappearing from the common landscape and these should be promoted at the expense of reclaimed sites wherever possible. My results support an effort for systematic implementation of early successional sites into conservation practice.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Spontaneous succession on opencast mining sites: implications for bird biodiversity

Šálek

2012

Journal of Applied Ecology

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“…Various previous studies have decomposed richness gradients based on size of species distributions (Lennon et al 2004, Vazquez and Gaston 2004, Arita and Rodriguez‐Tapia 2009, Sizling et al 2009). These studies have shown that the overall gradient is typically disproportionately dominated by the contribution of only the most broadly distributed species, and hence patterns of small ranged species have been underrepresented in most studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suggests that heterogeneity is complementary to energy and seasonality along this geographic range size dimension. The idea that measures of energy, climate and productivity are the strongest correlates of richness (Field et al 2009) might be produced by studies that have used all‐species gradients and consequently have relied disproportionately on the contribution of species with broad distributions (Sizling et al 2009). Other processes, like habitat heterogeneity, might be required to explain richness patterns of species with restricted distributions (Jetz and Rahbek 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple environmental determinants of regional species richness and effects of geographic range size

Tello¹,

Stevens²

2010

Ecography

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Understanding patterns of species richness at broad geographic extents remains one of the most challenging yet necessary scientific goals of our time. Many hypotheses have been proposed to account for spatial variation in species richness; among them, environmental determinants have played a central role. In this study, we use data on regional bat species richness in the New World to study redundancy and complementarity of three environmental hypotheses: energy, heterogeneity and seasonality. We accomplish this by partitioning variation in species richness among components associated with unique and combined effects of variables from each hypotheses, and by partitioning the overall richness gradient into gradients of species with varying breadths of geographic distribution. These three environmental hypotheses explain most variation in the species richness gradient of all bats, but do not account for all positive spatial autocorrelation at short distances. Although environmental predictors are highly redundant, energy and seasonality explain different and complementary fractions of variation in species richness of all bats. On the other hand, heterogeneity variables contribute little to explain this gradient. However, results change dramatically when richness is estimated for groups of species with different sizes of geographic distribution. First, the amount of variation explained by environment decreases with a decrease in range size; this suggests that richness gradients of small‐ranged species can not be explained as easily as those of broadly distributed species, as has been implied by analyses that do not consider differences in range size among species. Second, the relative contribution of environmental predictors to explained variation also changes with change in range size. Seasonality and energy are good predictors of species with broad distributions, but they loose almost all explanatory power for richness of species with small ranges. In contrast, heterogeneity, which is a relatively poor predictor of richness of species with large ranges, becomes the main predictor of richness gradients of species with restricted distributions. This suggests that range size is a different dimension on which heterogeneity and other environmental characteristics are complementary to each other. Our results suggest that determinants of species richness gradients might be complex, or at least more complex than many studies have previously suggested.

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“…and improve predictions of rare species (Lomba et al. , 2010) – the latter can prove important components of diversity (Sizling et al. , 2009) but are currently difficult to model with SDMs due to their low prevalence in datasets (Stockwell & Peterson, 2002); and (3) assessing what probability threshold should be used for converting predicted species probabilities into presence–absence information (Pineda & Lobo, 2009), and its implications for defining the species pool or developing approaches to use probabilistic predictions to reconstruct community properties directly.…”

Section: The Components Of the Framework: Current Knowledge And Futurmentioning

confidence: 99%

SESAM - a new framework integrating macroecological and species distribution models for predicting spatio-temporal patterns of species assemblages

Guisan

Rahbek

2011

Journal of Biogeography

395

475

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Two different approaches currently prevail for predicting spatial patterns of species assemblages. The first approach (macroecological modelling, MEM) focuses directly on realized properties of species assemblages, whereas the second approach (stacked species distribution modelling, S‐SDM) starts with constituent species to approximate the properties of assemblages. Here, we propose to unify the two approaches in a single ‘spatially explicit species assemblage modelling’ (SESAM) framework. This framework uses relevant designations of initial species source pools for modelling, macroecological variables, and ecological assembly rules to constrain predictions of the richness and composition of species assemblages obtained by stacking predictions of individual species distributions. We believe that such a framework could prove useful in many theoretical and applied disciplines of ecology and evolution, both for improving our basic understanding of species assembly across spatio‐temporal scales and for anticipating expected consequences of local, regional or global environmental changes. In this paper, we propose such a framework and call for further developments and testing across a broad range of community types in a variety of environments.

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Rarity, Commonness, and the Contribution of Individual Species to Species Richness Patterns

Cited by 40 publications

References 42 publications

Spontaneous succession on opencast mining sites: implications for bird biodiversity

Spontaneous succession on opencast mining sites: implications for bird biodiversity

Multiple environmental determinants of regional species richness and effects of geographic range size

SESAM - a new framework integrating macroecological and species distribution models for predicting spatio-temporal patterns of species assemblages

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