Higher taxa are sufficient to represent biodiversity patterns
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2020-04
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The scarcity of knowledge about both biodiversity (Linnean shortfall) and the geographic distributions of species
(Wallacean shortfall) makes it hard to conduct biomonitoring programs and studies that seek to explain biodiversity
patterns. One way to overcome this difficulty consists in the utilization of data with a lower taxonomic
resolution, an approach called taxonomic sufficiency or Higher Taxon Approach (HTA). The main aim of this
study was to evaluate, through a systematic review and meta-analysis, whether the HTA is reliable. We also
evaluated whether the strength of the HTA (i.e., the relationship between datasets at high and low taxonomic
resolutions) depended on different factors such as taxonomic level (genus, family, order and class), ecosystem
type (aquatic and terrestrial), biological group (e.g., invertebrates, vertebrates and plants), spatial extent and
higher taxa to species richness ratio (φ). We found that the HTA was a reliable approach in revealing species
richness and compositional patterns independently of biological groups and ecosystem types. As expected, the
strength of the HTA in describing biodiversity patterns decreased as the taxonomic resolution decreased. The
strength of the HTA increased with the spatial scale of the studies. The φ was the main predictor of the HTA.
Therefore, the use of higher taxonomic level (e.g., genera) is a reliable approach to save time and resources in
biomonitoring programs and differs in this regard from other approaches that have already been tested in other
studies (e.g., biological surrogacy). While the high HTA efficacy do not replace refined species level information
which is crucial for basic and applied ecological studies, we advocate the use of the HTA especially for biological
groups with high φ and for biomonitoring programs targeting large spatial extents.
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Taxonomic sufficiency, Composition, Meta-analysis, Species richness, Biomonitoring
Citação
OLIVEIRA JR, Sandro Souza de; ORTEGA, Jean C. G.; RIBAS, Luiz Guilherme dos Santos; LOPES, Vanessa Guimarães; BINI, Luis Mauricio. Higher taxa are sufficient to represent biodiversity patterns. Ecological Indicators, Amsterdam, v. 111, e105994, Apr. 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.105994. Disponível em: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X19309896. Acesso em: 30 dez. 2022.