Landscape structure as indicator of species diversity: a global meta-analysis

SCHINDLER, STEFAN; GALLARDO, ALBERTO; GONZÁLEZ, EDGARD; CORDONNIER, THOMAS; SOLER ESTEBAN, ROSINA MATILDE; LÓPEZ MARTÍNEZ, JORGE OMAR; HAINZ-RENETZEDER, CHRISTA; VASILIKI, KATI; WRBKA, THOMAS

Congreso; 3rd European Congress of Conservation Biology; 2012

European Section of the Society for Conservation Biology

The relation between landscape structure and species diversity is a major research topic in landscape ecology, population ecology, biogeography and conservation biology. However, the understanding of this relationremains elusive, and the results from different studies are often contradictory. For this reason, we conducted a meta-analysis encompassing different aspects of landscape structure and all groups of organisms. Around 900 ISI papers spanning four decades of research were scrutinized. This resulted in >4000 relevant cases, for which the strength of such relation was examined. Landscape heterogeneity, patch area, proportion of habitat in the surrounding landscape, and patch shape complexity were positively related with species diversity, while isolation showed an ambiguous relation. The strength of these relations differed among taxa, as plants were strongly related to landscape heterogeneity (preliminary results: mean R2 = 0.46), whereas animals were most sensitive to patch area (0.63). There was often an impact of the covariate naturalness of these relations, whereas latitude was rarely of importance. The conclusions derived from this meta-analysis contribute to the theoretical framework of the main ecological drivers of biodiversity. They havedirect conservation relevance as they support the choice of landscape indicators of species richness.