Synthesis reveals approximately balanced biotic differentiation and homogenization
Abstract
It is commonly thought that the biodiversity crisis includes widespread declines in the spatial variation of species composition, called biotic homogenization. Using a typology relating homogenization and differentiation to local and regional diversity changes, we synthesize patterns across 461 metacommunities surveyed for 10 to 91 years, and 64 species checklists (13 to 500+ years). Across all datasets, we found that no change was the most common outcome, but with many instances of homogenization and differentiation. A weak homogenizing trend of a 0.3% increase in species shared among communities/year on average was driven by increased numbers of widespread (high occupancy) species and strongly associated with checklist data that have longer durations and large spatial scales. At smaller spatial and temporal scales, we show that homogenization and differentiation can be driven by changes in the number and spatial distributions of both rare and common species. The multiscale perspective introduced here can help identify scale-dependent drivers underpinning biotic differentiation and homogenization.
Citation
Blowes , S A , McGill , B , Brambilla , V , Chow , C F Y , Engel , T , Fontrodona-Eslava , A , Martins , I S , McGlinn , D , Moyes , F , Sagouis , A , Shimadzu , H , van Klink , R , Xu , W B , Gotelli , N J , Magurran , A , Dornelas , M & Chase , J M 2024 , ' Synthesis reveals approximately balanced biotic differentiation and homogenization ' , Science Advances , vol. 10 , no. 8 , eadj9395 . https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj9395
Publication
Science Advances
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2375-2548Type
Journal article
Description
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118, to S.A.B., T.E., A.S., R.v.K., W.-B.X., and J.M.C.) and ERC GA 101044975 and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (to M.D.). This work was also supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) project “Establishment of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)” in the consortium NFDI4Biodiversity (project number 442032008) (to T.E.), European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 894644 (to I.S.M.), USDA Hatch grant MAFES #1011538 and NSF EPSCOR Track II grant #2019470 (to B.M.), and NSF Track II grant #2019470 (to N.J.G.).Collections
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