Scaling disturbance instead of richness to better understand anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity.

ABSTRACT: A primary impediment to understanding how species diversity and anthropogenic disturbance are related is that both diversity and disturbance can depend on the scales at which they are sampled. While the scale dependence of diversity estimation has received substantial attention, the scale dependence of disturbance estimation has been essentially overlooked. Here, we break from conventional examination of the diversity-disturbance relationship by holding the area over which species richness is estimated constant and instead manipulating the area over which human disturbance is measured. In the boreal forest ecoregion of Alberta, Canada, we test the dependence of species richness on disturbance scale, the scale-dependence of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, and the consistency of the

SUBMITTER: Mayor SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4423832 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature