Improving the use of environmental diversity as a surrogate for species representation.

ABSTRACT: The continuous p-median approach to environmental diversity (ED) is a reliable way to identify sites that efficiently represent species. A recently developed maximum dispersion (maxdisp) approach to ED is computationally simpler, does not require the user to reduce environmental space to two dimensions, and performed better than continuous p-median for datasets of South African animals. We tested whether maxdisp performs as well as continuous p-median for 12 datasets that included plants and other continents, and whether particular types of environmental variables produced consistently better models of ED. We selected 12 species inventories and atlases to span a broad range of taxa (plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians), spatial extents, and resolutions. For each dataset, we us

SUBMITTER: Albuquerque F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5773334 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature