Biodiversity shows unique responses to land-use change across regional biomes

Abstract

Biogeography has a critical influence on how ecological communities respond to threats and how effective conservation interventions are designed. For example, the resilience of ecological communities is linked to environmental and climatic features, and the nature of threats impacting ecosystems also varies geographically. Understanding community-level threat responses may be most accurate at fine spatial scales, however collecting detailed ecological data at such a high resolution would be prohibitively resource intensive. In this study, we aim to find the spatial scale that could best capture variation in community-level threat responses whilst keeping data collection requirements feasible. Using a database of biodiversity records with extensive global coverage, we modelled species richness and total abundance (the responses) across land-use types (reflecting threats), considering three different spatial scales: biomes, biogeographical realms, and regional biomes (the interaction between realm and biome). We then modelled data from three highly sampled biomes separately to ask how responses to threat differ between regional biomes and taxonomic group. We found strong support for regional biomes in explaining variation in species richness and total abundance compared to biomes or realms alone. Our biome case studies demonstrate that there is a high variation in magnitude and direction of threat responses across both regional biomes and taxonomic group, but all groups in tropical forest showed a consistently negative response, whilst many taxon-regional biome groups showed no clear response to threat in temperate forest and tropical grassland. Our results suggest that the taxon-regional biome unit has potential as a reasonable spatial and ecological scale for understanding how ecological communities respond to threats and designing effective conservation interventions to bend the curve on biodiversity loss.