• Login
    View Item 
    •   CIB Repository
    • CORE TEAM RESEARCH OUTPUTS
    • RESEARCH: Robertson, M
    • View Item
    •   CIB Repository
    • CORE TEAM RESEARCH OUTPUTS
    • RESEARCH: Robertson, M
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Reconsidering environmental diversity (ED) as a biodiversity surrogacy strategy

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Robertson_BiolConserv_2016.pdf (650.3Kb)
    Date
    2016
    Author
    Engelbrecht, I.
    Robertson, M.
    Stolz, M.
    Joubert, J.W.
    Format Extent
    665961 bytes
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Environmental Diversity (ED) has been proposed as a potential biodiversity surrogate for use in spatial biodiversity planning. The concept is based on the premise that differences in species composition between areas are correlated with differences in environmental conditions. If this is true then sites selected to represent the full range of environmental conditions in an area should provide good coverage of species diversity. This is potentially significant for conservation planning because environmental data are more easily available while species distribution data are often incomplete, but empirical tests of ED have been inconclusive. We explored the value of ED as a biodiversity surrogate using species distribution data from South Africa, focusing on how implementation affects its performance. We used empirical distribution datasets for birds, butterflies, frogs, and reptiles as well as artificial species distributions and modeled distributions for butterflies. Our results show that the form of the underlying optimization model and the number of environmental variables have a significant effect on the performance of ED while the choice of heuristic procedures for selecting sites has no significant effect.We conclude that ED can performwell as a biodiversity surrogacy strategy if it is implemented correctly.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/2053
    Collections
    • RESEARCH: Robertson, M [47]

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2016  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
     

     

    Browse

    All of CIB RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsBy Date CreatedThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsBy Date Created

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2016  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback