Spatial diversity in a 'zoom-lens': Analysing ecological communities through weighted spatial scale

摘要

Traditional summary statistics for biological diversity are rarely able to fully identify processes maintaining the biodiversity of ecosystems. However, these processes produce patterns in space, and spatial statistics offer a way to describe such signals and so identify underlying mechanisms. A new community-level measure of spatial structure, the cross-pair overlap distribution (xPOD), summarises the spatial overlap of species pairs over a scale defined by radius R. Here, we extend this approach by developing a radius-weighted version of the xPOD which provides greater flexibility over spatial resolution. In particular, this allows us to identify behaviour related to different mechanisms, which can then be linked to the spatial scale at which they operate. In its general form, this approach can be applied to any community-level second-order summary statistic which is a function of scale, leading to a considerable increase in informative power.