Biodiversity Models: What If Unsaturation Is the Rule?

Improving biodiversity predictions is essential if we are to meet the challenges posed by global change. As knowledge is key to feed models, we need to evaluate how debated theory can affect models. An important ongoing debate is whether environmental constraints limit the number of species that can coexist in a community (saturation), with recent findings suggesting that species richness in many communities might be unsaturated. Here, we propose that biodiversity models could address this issue by accounting for a duality: considering communities as unsaturated but where species composition is constrained by different scale-dependent biodiversity drivers. We identify a variety of promising advances for incorporating this duality into commonly applied biodiversity modelling approaches and improving their spatial predictions.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution

• Publication date

  2017-08-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2017.05.003PMID 28610851PMCID 5516772
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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