Species undersampling in tropical bat surveys: effects on emerging biodiversity patterns

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Biodiversity Science
• Conservation Biology

Background:

• Tropical ecosystems harbor high species richness, making comprehensive biodiversity surveys challenging and costly.
• Undersampling is common in tropical surveys, potentially impacting our understanding of species richness and community composition.
• Cost-effective survey and monitoring programs are crucial for tropical biodiversity conservation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the consequences of species undersampling on patterns of species richness and compositional variation in tropical bat surveys.
• To assess the congruence between original and subset data sets to understand information loss.
• To determine factors influencing sample representativeness and identify reliable surrogate subsets for efficient surveys.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed 27 tropical bat assemblage data sets.
• Correlated original data with subsets where species were randomly or selectively removed (based on rarity).
• Assessed the impact of species loss on species richness and compositional variation patterns.

Main Results:

• Species richness patterns remained robust with up to 20% random species loss.
• Accurate assessment of species composition required retaining approximately 90% of species in random subsets.
• Removing the rarest species (approx. 10%) resulted in strong correlations (r > 0.95) for both species richness and composition.
• Species subsets comprising ~85% of the original set served as reliable surrogates for many tropical bat assemblages.

Conclusions:

• Undersampling, particularly by removing rare species, can enhance the cost-effectiveness of tropical bat surveys and monitoring.
• While species richness is resilient to moderate undersampling, compositional patterns are more sensitive.
• Adaptive monitoring schemes and site-specific assessments are vital due to the influence of assemblage characteristics on subset reliability.