Working Group on Species-area Relationships and Beta Diversity

Participants: Jason Fridley, Joel Gramling, Todd Jobe, Jessica Kaplan, Megan McKnight, Amanda Senft, Dave Vandermast, Peter White, Tom Wentworth, and Bob Peet

Publications:

Fridley, J.D., Gramling, J.M., Jobe, R.T., Kaplan, J.A., McKnight, M., Senft, A., Vandermast, D.B., and Peet, R.K. 2003. Fine-scale species-area relationships of the vascular flora of the Southeast.

Abstract: Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Savannah, GA. [PowerPoints]

Outline: Publication [September 9, 2003]

November 2003 draft

Other documents and information:

Fridley - Jan 2, 2002
Fridley - Jan 15, 2002
Fridley - June 25, 2002
Palmer - Aug 20, 2002
Palmer - Aug 27, 2002
Fridley - Sep 19, 2002
Gramling - Sep 19, 2002
Peet - Sep 20, 2002
Fridley - Sep 20, 2002
Fridley - Sep 20, 2002a
Wentworth - Sep 28, 2002
Peet - Oct 20, 2002
Fridley - Jan 15, 2003
Fridley - Jan 20, 2003
Preston discussion - Jan 2003
Ecotone discussion - Jan 2003
Fridley - Jan 24, 2003
White & Jobe - February 2, 2003
Gramling & group - February 4, 2003
Fridley, National Parks Proposal, updated Dec 2002
Fridley - Nov 5, 2003
Fridley - Dec 9, 2003

Readings:

Species-area relationships - Palmer's Bibliography

Ferrier, Simon. 2002. Mapping Spatial Pattern in Biodiversity for Regional Conservation Planning: Where to from Here? Systematic Biology 51(2):331-363, 2002. [I found a very stimulating paper by Simon Ferrier that should be of interest to the Ecoinformatics group. I'm still working my way through this longish paper,
but I found the discussion of the SAI (species accumulation index) of
special interest (see text related to Figure 5) to our work with species
accumulation curves.TRW ]

Wilson J.B. & Chiaruccia A . 2000. Do plant communities exist? Evidence from scaling-up local species-area relations to the regional level. J. Veg. Sci. 11:773-775. (Abstract: One long tradition in ecology is that discrete communities exist, at least in the sense that there are areas of relatively uniform vegetation, with more rapid change in species composition between them. The alternative extreme view is the Self-similarity concept - that similar community variation occurs at all spatial scales. We test between these two by calculating species-area curves within areas of vegetation that are as uniform as can be found, and then extrapolating the within-community variation to much larger areas, that will contain many 'communities'. Using the Arrhenius species-area model, the extrapolations are remarkably close to the observed number of species at the regional/country level. We conclude that the type of heterogeneity that occurs within 'homogeneous' communities is sufficient to explain species richness at much larger scales. Therefore, whilst we can speak of 'communities' for convenience, the variation that certainly exists at the 'community' level can be seen as only a larger-scale manifestation of micro-habitat variation.)

He, F. & Legendre, P. 1996. On Species-Area Relation. American Naturalist 148: 719-737.