Environmental diversity as a surrogate for species representation

Area of Science:

• Conservation Biology
• Biodiversity Assessment
• Spatial Planning

Background:

• Conservation planning often relies on surrogates due to gaps in species data.
• Discrete and continuous surrogates are commonly used, but their effectiveness varies.
• Environmental diversity (ED) is a continuous surrogate with theoretical advantages but mixed empirical support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To re-evaluate the effectiveness of Environmental diversity (ED) as a surrogate for conservation planning.
• To test an improved implementation of ED across diverse taxa and geographic regions.
• To compare ED's performance against discrete surrogates and random selection.

Main Methods:

• Applied an improved Environmental diversity (ED) selection algorithm.
• Tested ED on multiple datasets: European birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians; plants of Zimbabwe; birds of Spain; birds of Arizona.
• Compared ED-selected sites with randomly selected sites and discrete surrogates.

Main Results:

• ED-selected sites represented 7 out of 8 tested datasets with 20% to 84% effectiveness.
• ED performed significantly better than random selection for most datasets.
• ED outperformed previous tests and most discrete surrogates in representing species.

Conclusions:

• An improved Environmental diversity (ED) approach shows strong potential as an effective conservation surrogate.
• Previous underperformance of ED may be due to limited explanatory variables and suboptimal algorithms.
• Future research should focus on finer grain sizes, species turnover variables, and non-climate abiotic factors for ED.