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Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains

Species turnover and its components related to replacement and nestedness form a significant element of diversity that is historically poorly accounted for in conservation planning. To inform biodiversity conservation and contribute to a broader understanding of patterns in species turnover, we unde...

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Autores principales: Gibson, Neil, Prober, Suzanne, Meissner, Rachel, van Leeuwen, Stephen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5330496/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28245232
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172977
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author Gibson, Neil
Prober, Suzanne
Meissner, Rachel
van Leeuwen, Stephen
author_facet Gibson, Neil
Prober, Suzanne
Meissner, Rachel
van Leeuwen, Stephen
author_sort Gibson, Neil
collection PubMed
description Species turnover and its components related to replacement and nestedness form a significant element of diversity that is historically poorly accounted for in conservation planning. To inform biodiversity conservation and contribute to a broader understanding of patterns in species turnover, we undertook a floristic survey of 160 plots along an 870 km transect across oligotrophic sandplains, extending from the mesic south coast to the arid interior of south-western Australia. A nested survey design was employed to sample distances along the transect as evenly as possible. Species turnover was correlated with geographic distance at both regional and local scales, consistent with dispersal limitation being a significant driver of species turnover. When controlled for species richness, species replacement was found to be the dominant component of species turnover and was uniformly high across the transect, uncorrelated with either climatic or edaphic factors. This high replacement rate, well documented in the mega-diverse south-west, appears to also be a consistent feature of arid zone vegetation systems despite a decrease in overall species richness. Species turnover increased rapidly with increasing extent along the transect reaching an asymptote at ca. 50 km. These findings are consistent with earlier work in sandplain and mallee vegetation in the south-west and suggests reserve based conservation strategies are unlikely to be practicable in the south-western Australia sandplains when communities are defined by species incidence rather than dominance.
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spelling pubmed-53304962017-03-09 Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains Gibson, Neil Prober, Suzanne Meissner, Rachel van Leeuwen, Stephen PLoS One Research Article Species turnover and its components related to replacement and nestedness form a significant element of diversity that is historically poorly accounted for in conservation planning. To inform biodiversity conservation and contribute to a broader understanding of patterns in species turnover, we undertook a floristic survey of 160 plots along an 870 km transect across oligotrophic sandplains, extending from the mesic south coast to the arid interior of south-western Australia. A nested survey design was employed to sample distances along the transect as evenly as possible. Species turnover was correlated with geographic distance at both regional and local scales, consistent with dispersal limitation being a significant driver of species turnover. When controlled for species richness, species replacement was found to be the dominant component of species turnover and was uniformly high across the transect, uncorrelated with either climatic or edaphic factors. This high replacement rate, well documented in the mega-diverse south-west, appears to also be a consistent feature of arid zone vegetation systems despite a decrease in overall species richness. Species turnover increased rapidly with increasing extent along the transect reaching an asymptote at ca. 50 km. These findings are consistent with earlier work in sandplain and mallee vegetation in the south-west and suggests reserve based conservation strategies are unlikely to be practicable in the south-western Australia sandplains when communities are defined by species incidence rather than dominance. Public Library of Science 2017-02-28 /pmc/articles/PMC5330496/ /pubmed/28245232 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172977 Text en © 2017 Gibson et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Gibson, Neil
Prober, Suzanne
Meissner, Rachel
van Leeuwen, Stephen
Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title_full Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title_fullStr Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title_full_unstemmed Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title_short Implications of high species turnover on the south-western Australian sandplains
title_sort implications of high species turnover on the south-western australian sandplains
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5330496/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28245232
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172977
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