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SELECTING INDICATORS OF BIODIVERSITY FOR CONSERVATION PLANNING: IDENTIFYING THE MECHANISMS BEHIND INDICATOR GROUP PERFORMANCE
Citation:
Lawler, J. J. AND R D. White. SELECTING INDICATORS OF BIODIVERSITY FOR CONSERVATION PLANNING: IDENTIFYING THE MECHANISMS BEHIND INDICATOR GROUP PERFORMANCE. Presented at Ecological Society of America, Portland, OR, August 2-6, 2004.
Description:
Most conservation planning is constrained by time and funding. In particular, the selection of areas to protect biodiversity must often be completed with limited data on species distributions. Consequently, different groups of species have been proposed as indicators or surrogates of biodiversity for use in the site-selection process. Although many studies have tested indicator groups, they have produced divergent results that vary with taxonomy, methodology, scale, and location. Few of these studies have provided useful guidelines for selecting successful indicator groups. We tested five hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the performance of indicator groups. We investigated whether performance was linked to 1) taxonomic diversity, 2) the degree of nestedness of species distributions, 3) the geographic range sizes of species in the group, 4) the diversity of environments occupied by group members, and 5) the degree to which group members were representative of diversity hotspots. We investigated these hypotheses with a database of occurrences of 920 species over an area of 317,000-km2 in the eastern United States. We compared groups of species selected at random with a set of the best performing indicator groups selected with a stochastic optimization technique. Only range size and environmental diversity-both factors controlling the total area in a reserve network-had a major influence on indicator group performance. These results provide basic guidelines for the use of indicator groups in conservation planning.