Measuring more of biodiversity: Can higher-taxon richness predict wholesale species richness?

Abstract To assess conservation priorities, a means of measuring the distribution of a much larger part of overall biodiversity is needed that will at the same time reduce the colossal sampling problems of exhaustive surveys. One possibility is a ‘top-down’ taxonomic approach, in which the biodiversity of different areas may be compared using measures based on the number of higher taxa present in each. The advantage of this approach is that survey costs should be greatly reduced because identification to species level, particularly within the few hyper-rich higher taxa, would be unnecessary. We report that family richness is a good predictor of species richness for a variety of groups and regions, including both British ferns and British butterflies among 100 km × 100 km (10,000 km2) grid squares, Australian passerine birds among 5° × 5° grid squares (c. 220,000–310,000 km2) and 10° × 10° grid squares (c. 970,000–1,190,000 km2), and North and Central American bats among grid squares of c. 611,000 km2. With careful choice of higher-taxon rank, it may be possible to re-deploy effort from taxonomically intensive to taxonomically extensive surveys, in order to estimate the global distribution of a much larger proportion of overall biodiversity at the same cost.

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