A multiscale framework for disentangling the roles of evenness, density, and aggregation on diversity gradients.

ABSTRACT: Disentangling the drivers of diversity gradients can be challenging. The Measurement of Biodiversity (MoB) framework decomposes scale-dependent changes in species diversity into three components of community structure: species abundance distribution (SAD), total community abundance, and within-species spatial aggregation. Here we extend MoB from categorical treatment comparisons to quantify variation along continuous geographic or environmental gradients. Our approach requires sites along a gradient, each consisting of georeferenced plots of abundance-based species composition data. We demonstrate our method using a case study of ants sampled along an elevational gradient of 28 sites in a mixed deciduous forest of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, USA. MoB analysis revealed that dec

SUBMITTER: McGlinn DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7900956 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature