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A rapid assessment of landscape biodiversity using diversity profiles of arthropod morphospecies

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Abstract

Context

The assessment of land-use impacts on biodiversity is one of the central themes of landscape ecology and conservation biology. However, due to the complexity of biodiversity, it is impossible to obtain complete information about the diversity of all species even for small areas, necessitating the selection of individual species or assemblages thereof as species surrogate. In parts of the world where taxonomic expertise is lacking, species identification has hindered progress in biodiversity conservation, and the only practical, relatively-accurate option, is the use of taxonomic minimalism.

Objective

We carried out a rapid biodiversity assessment based on three surrogates—land-use (driver-surrogate), terrestrial arthropods (species-surrogate) and morphospecies (taxonomic-surrogate)—to determine the impacts of land-use on biodiversity of the Western Region (Ghana), an area covering ~4 % of the West African biodiversity hotspot.

Method

We used diversity profiles to visualize the distribution of a total of 8848 arthropod individuals over seven land-use types which define the complete heterogeneity of the landscape.

Results

Here, we present both sample and asymptotic diversity profiles of arthropod morphospecies for each land-use type and the potential of each land-use type for conserving arthropods.

Conclusions

We conclude that (1) the morphospecies approach is useful for detecting differences in species diversity of land-use types; (2) the concept of asymptotic diversity may not be necessary for land-use based biodiversity comparison; and (3) maximum diversity profiles are useful for determining the land-use conservation values in cases where pristine areas are not available.

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Acknowledgments

Primary support for Kwame Oppong Hackman came from a research Grant from Tsinghua University research (Grant Number 2012Z02287). The authors wish to acknowledge the support of Messrs John Nuapa Aidoo and Isaac Darko who offered great support during the collection and classification of data. We also thank the Ghana Forestry Commission (GFC) for granting access to the Subri River and Krokosua forest reserves and also to the GFC staff at Daboase and Juaboso for their support in identifying and setting up experiments in suitable areas of the reserves. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments and suggestions helped us to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Center for Earth System Science, Institute for Global Change Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Kwame O. Hackman, Peng Gong & Sergey Venevsky

Authors
  1. Kwame O. Hackman
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  2. Peng Gong
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  3. Sergey Venevsky
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kwame O. Hackman.

Electronic supplementary material

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Appendix A1

Description of collection sites. Detailed description of sites of collection (DOCX 7318 kb)

Appendix A2

Proof of Equation 2. A short proof of equation 2 (DOCX 12 kb)

Appendix A3

Matlab codes. M-files (Matlab scripts) for computing the diversities and plotting the diversity profiles (TXT 7 kb)

Appendix A4

Diversity profile plots. Plots of non-asymptotic and asymptotic diversity profiles for each type of land-use (ZIP 965 kb)

Appendix A5

Ecological data. Arthropod morphospecies data for each land-use type and for each trap type (including pooled data) (ZIP 61 kb)

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Hackman, K.O., Gong, P. & Venevsky, S. A rapid assessment of landscape biodiversity using diversity profiles of arthropod morphospecies. Landscape Ecol 32, 209–223 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0440-4

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