What's hot and what's not: Making sense of biodiversity 'hotspots'.

ABSTRACT: Conserving biogeographic regions with especially high biodiversity, known as biodiversity 'hotspots', is intuitive because finite resources can be focussed towards manageable units. Yet, biodiversity, environmental conditions and their relationship are more complex with multidimensional properties. Assessments which ignore this risk failing to detect change, identify its direction or gauge the scale of appropriate intervention. Conflicting concepts which assume assemblages as either sharply delineated communities or loosely collected species have also hampered progress in the way we assess and conserve biodiversity. We focus on the marine benthos where delineating manageable areas for conservation is an attractive prospect because it holds most marine species and constitutes the largest si

SUBMITTER: Thompson MSA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7839497 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature