Measuring β-diversity with species abundance data

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Spatial Ecology
• Biodiversity Science

Background:

• Beta-diversity is crucial for understanding spatial ecology.
• Numerous metrics exist to quantify beta-diversity, necessitating careful selection.
• A previous review identified trade-offs and redundancies among presence-absence metrics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the performance of abundance-based beta-diversity metrics.
• To test 16 conceptual and 2 sampling properties of beta-diversity metrics.
• To identify redundancies and performance trade-offs among existing metrics.

Main Methods:

• Evaluated 29 abundance-based beta-diversity metrics against 16 conceptual and 2 sampling properties.
• Assessed metric performance based on independence from alpha-diversity, monotonicity with turnover, and behavior with nestedness.
• Compared abundance-based metrics to presence-absence metrics like betaSim.

Main Results:

• Thirteen of the tested metrics were outperformed or equaled by others across all properties.
• Abundance-based metrics generally show less bias with undersampling, aiding rare species detection.
• Only betaBaselga R turn, betaBaselga B-C turn, and betaSim purely measured species turnover and were independent of nestedness.

Conclusions:

• Significant redundancy exists among current beta-diversity metrics.
• A performance trade-off exists between sample size bias and detecting rare species turnover.
• Future abundance-based metrics should address the estimation of unseen shared and unshared species.