Changes in species diversity following habitat disturbance are dependent on spatial scale: theoretical and empirical evidence

Summary 1. Many studies have examined the impacts of tropical habitat disturbance. However, the effects of moderate habitat disturbance on species diversity show little consensus, with both increased and decreased diversity following disturbance being reported with approximately equal frequency. Previous work has shown that the spatial scale of sampling affects the reported changes in diversity following habitat disturbance, and here we present new theoretical and empirical data which explain why this is so. 2. We assume that habitat disturbance reduces the slope of the species-area relationship (SAR), and we show theoretically that this reduction in the slope results in a scale-dependent response of diversity to disturbance. Thus, following moderate habitat disturbance, diversity is reported to increase when measured at small spatial scales but declines when measured at large spatial scales. Our findings suggest that even a very small change in the SAR slope following disturbance corre sponds with a scale-dependent response of diversity to disturbance. 3. We analyse new empirical data for tropical butterflies at a range of spatial scales (~ 3-80 ha). Our results support our theoretical findings and the notion of scale-dependence in estimates of diversity. We show that this scale-dependence occurs because a and ? diversity increase with spatial scale at a significantly faster rate in undisturbed forest compared with disturbed forest. This is due to reduced habitat heterogeneity and reduced spatial autocorrelation of butterfly diversity data fol

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