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“Introduction

There is a deep-rooted tradition of studying spatial variation in species composition and delineating Selleck EPZ5676 distinct ecological areas in terms of differences in species composition. At present, an understanding

of the spatial variation in biotic composition and its underlying mechanisms is pivotal to conservation biology (Margules and Pressey 2000). In recent decades, species richness has declined rapidly (Thomas et al. 2004; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005), urging effective conservation and restoration strategies. Ensuing research has yielded numerous strategies for nature conservation. Efforts to prioritize areas for nature conservation worldwide have included circumscribing ‘hotspots’; areas with high species diversity or high levels of endemic, rare, or threatened species Saracatinib (Myers et al. 2000; Margules et al. 2002; Fox and Beckley 2005; Tchouto et al. 2006). However, concentrations of overall species diversity Teicoplanin and

of endangered and endemic species do not necessarily coincide (Prendergast et al. 1993; Orme et al. 2005). A refined method to select areas with high conservation value is to estimate an area’s complementarity: the context-dependent, marginal gain in biodiversity that its preservation would provide. Reserve selection methods based on the complementarity principle and the use of advanced computer algorithms are popular (Rodrigues and Gaston 2002; Williams et al. 2006) but, according to Faith et al. (2003), nowhere have the sets of areas thus selected been implemented in regional conservation planning. In the absence of basic, fine-scaled data on the distribution of most species, both approaches depend on surrogate information. As distribution patterns do not necessarily coincide for different taxonomic groups, it is debatable whether indicator, umbrella, or keystone taxa could serve as surrogates for total biodiversity (Williams and Gaston 1994; Andelman and Fagan 2000; Ricketts et al. 2002; Kati et al. 2004; Wiens et al. 2008). It is also debatable whether the focus should be on mammals, birds, and vascular plants, the dominant trend in conservation research and policy, instead of on overall biodiversity, healthy ecosystems, or the Earth’s genetic library (Jepson and Canney 2001). A different approach is to use specific environmental conditions (Pienkowski et al.