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of wet grasslands in relation to environmental factors. Biodivers Conserv. doi:10.​1007/​s10531-013-0448-x”
“Introduction Tropical forests contain much of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and significant carbon stocks (Bunker et al. 2005). Particular interest centres on assessing the biodiversity value of modified and disturbed forest ecosystems and the ability of such systems to buffer biodiversity losses expected with the degradation selleck screening library or conversion of more pristine habitats (Wright and Muller-Landau 2006; Chazdon et al. 2009). A complete inventory of organisms is not feasible (Lawton et al. 1998), but conservation management can benefit from the identification of any surrogate that broadly predicts overall biodiversity

by reflecting the major determinants of taxonomic variety and species richness (Meijaard and Sheil 2012). One approach is to find and use easily assessed indicators (partial measures or estimator surrogates, sensu Sarkar and Margules 2002). However, selection of such indicators remains predominantly intuitive rather than evidence-based (Howard et al. 1997; Lawton et al. 1998; Watt 1998; Noss 1999; Dudley et al. 2005; Kessler et al. 2011; Le et al. 2012) and there remains the challenge of distinguishing change that can be attributed to external anthropogenic factors from underlying natural processes (Magurran et al. 2010). Candidate indicators such as landscape metrics, remotely-sensed variables, multi-species indices these and formulated measures of ecosystem complexity or genetic diversity have found wide application but are of limited

practicality in forests (UNEP-CBD 1996; Kapos et al. 2001; Delbaere 2002; European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (ESAC) 2004; Gregory et al. 2005; Duraiappah and Naeem 2005). Thus forest biodiversity surveys still maintain a taxonomic focus even though the costs of obtaining sufficient sampling can be high and the utility of any one species, or another single taxon, as a predictor of others remains uncertain (Lawton et al. 1998; Watt et al. 1998; Dufrêne and Legendre 1997; UNEP/CBD 2003; Gregory et al. 2005, but see also Blasticidin S Schulze et al. 2004). Further, at large spatial scales where within-region diversity is large, higher level taxa (up to family level) must often be used (Villaseñor et al. 2005), but even this is only justifiable where extensive species data are already available (Sarkar et al. 2005).