TY - JOUR

T1 - Multitrophic diversity in a biodiverse forest is highly nonlinear across spatial scales

AU - Schuldt, Andreas

AU - Wubet, Tesfaye

AU - Buscot, Francois

AU - Staab, Michael

AU - Aßmann, Thorsten

AU - Böhnke-Kammerlander, Martin

AU - Both, Sabine

AU - Erfmeier, Alexandra

AU - Klein, Alexandra-Maria

AU - Ma, Keping

AU - Pietsch, Katherina

AU - Schultze, Sabrina

AU - Wirth, Christian

AU - Zhang, Jiayong

AU - Zumstein, Pascale

AU - Bruelheide, Helge

N1 - We thank the administration of the Gutianshan National Nature Reserve and members of the BEF-China consortium for support, the many people involved in the plant and arthropod censuses, and T. Fang, S. Chen, T. Li, M. Ohl and C.-D. Zhu for help with species identification. G. Seidler kindly calculated forest cover and T. Scholten and P. Kühn provided soil data. The study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG FOR 891/1, 891/2), the Sino-German Centre for Research Promotion (GZ 524, 592, 698, 699, 785 and 1020) and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC 30710103907 and 30930005).

PY - 2015/12/10

Y1 - 2015/12/10

N2 - Subtropical and tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, and untangling the spatial scaling of their diversity is fundamental for understanding global species richness and conserving biodiversity essential to human well-being. However, scale-dependent diversity distributions among coexisting taxa remain poorly understood for heterogeneous environments in biodiverse regions. We show that diversity relations among 43 taxa—including plants, arthropods and microorganisms—in a mountainous subtropical forest are highly nonlinear across spatial scales. Taxon-specific differences in β-diversity cause under- or overestimation of overall diversity by up to 50% when using surrogate taxa such as plants. Similar relationships may apply to half of all (sub)tropical forests—including major biodiversity hotspots—where high environmental heterogeneity causes high biodiversity and species turnover. Our study highlights that our general understanding of biodiversity patterns has to be improved—and that much larger areas will be required than in better-studied lowland forests—to reliably estimate biodiversity distributions and devise conservation strategies for the world’s biodiverse regions.

AB - Subtropical and tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, and untangling the spatial scaling of their diversity is fundamental for understanding global species richness and conserving biodiversity essential to human well-being. However, scale-dependent diversity distributions among coexisting taxa remain poorly understood for heterogeneous environments in biodiverse regions. We show that diversity relations among 43 taxa—including plants, arthropods and microorganisms—in a mountainous subtropical forest are highly nonlinear across spatial scales. Taxon-specific differences in β-diversity cause under- or overestimation of overall diversity by up to 50% when using surrogate taxa such as plants. Similar relationships may apply to half of all (sub)tropical forests—including major biodiversity hotspots—where high environmental heterogeneity causes high biodiversity and species turnover. Our study highlights that our general understanding of biodiversity patterns has to be improved—and that much larger areas will be required than in better-studied lowland forests—to reliably estimate biodiversity distributions and devise conservation strategies for the world’s biodiverse regions.

KW - Ecosystems Research

KW - biodiversity

KW - Conservation biology

KW - Forest ecology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84949646400&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1038/ncomms10169

DO - 10.1038/ncomms10169

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 26658136

VL - 6

JO - Nature Communications

JF - Nature Communications

SN - 2041-1723

M1 - 10169

ER -