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closeenhancing NI
Posted by DanFaith on 15 May 2011 at 02:03 GMT
It appears that the NI assumes that an ecosystem type is the same everywhere, in its baseline or reference biodiversity make-up.
A simple enhancement of NI could take into account the heterogeneity within types that is currently missing.
For example, open lowland provides an overall score towards the NI based on the sum of individual locality values – but the loss of biodiversity perhaps is particularly high given the apparent geographic clumping of impacts (fig 3e), and this may not be detected by the NI index.
A simple enhancement of NI could picture localities within a type as having different positions along environmental gradients. Then, using the ED measure, departures from reference condition for localities clumped in environmental space is recorded as a relatively greater biodiversity loss within that ecosystem type.
for background see e.g.:
Faith, D.P, Ferrier, S & Walker, P.A (2004) The ED strategy: how species-level surrogates indicate general biodiversity patterns through an ‘environmental diversity’ perspective. Journal of Biogeography, 31:1207–1217.