Biodiversity change is uncoupled from species richness trends: Consequences for conservation and monitoring

Abstract Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with international policy seeking to conserve biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions. Quantifying the trends in biodiversity is far from trivial, however, as recently documented by meta‐analyses, which report little if any net change in local species richness through time. Here, we summarise several limitations of species richness as a metric of biodiversity change and show that the expectation of directional species richness trends under changing conditions is invalid. Instead, we illustrate how a set of species turnover indices…

• DF
  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

  Awards: FZT 118, DFG FZT 118
• DZ
  Deutsches Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung Halle-Jena-Leipzig

  Awards: DFG FZT 118, FZT 118
• ID
  Iowa Department of Natural Resources
• R
  Rijkswaterstaat