Moritz C, Richardson K S, Ferrier S, Monteith G B, Stanisic J, Williams S E, Whiffin T
Rainforest-CRC, Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia.
Proc Biol Sci. 2001 Sep 22;268(1479):1875-81. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2001.1713.
Prioritizing areas for conservation requires the use of surrogates for assessing overall patterns of biodiversity. Effective surrogates will reflect general biogeographical patterns and the evolutionary processes that have given rise to these and their efficiency is likely to be influenced by several factors, including the spatial scale of species turnover and the overall congruence of the biogeographical history. We examine patterns of surrogacy for insects, snails, one family of plants and vertebrates from rainforests of northeast Queensland, an area characterized by high endemicity and an underlying history of climate-induced vicariance. Nearly all taxa provided some level of prediction of the conservation values for others. However, despite an overall correlation of the patterns of species richness and complementarity, the efficiency of surrogacy was highly asymmetric; snails and insects were strong predictors of conservation priorities for vertebrates, but not vice versa. These results confirm predictions that taxon surrogates can be effective in highly diverse tropical systems where there is a strong history of vicariant biogeography, but also indicate that correlated patterns for species richness and/or complementarity do not guarantee that one taxon will be efficient as a surrogate for another. In our case, the highly diverse and narrowly distributed invertebrates were more efficient as predictors than the less diverse and more broadly distributed vertebrates.
确定保护区域的优先顺序需要使用替代物来评估生物多样性的整体模式。有效的替代物将反映一般的生物地理模式以及产生这些模式的进化过程，其效率可能受到几个因素的影响，包括物种更替的空间尺度和生物地理历史的整体一致性。我们研究了来自昆士兰东北部雨林的昆虫、蜗牛、一个植物科和脊椎动物的替代模式，该地区以高特有性和气候引起的隔离的潜在历史为特征。几乎所有的分类单元都对其他分类单元的保护价值提供了一定程度的预测。然而，尽管物种丰富度和互补性模式总体上存在相关性，但替代效率却高度不对称；蜗牛和昆虫是脊椎动物保护优先级的有力预测指标，但反之则不然。这些结果证实了这样的预测，即在具有强烈隔离生物地理历史的高度多样化的热带系统中，分类单元替代物可能是有效的，但也表明物种丰富度和/或互补性的相关模式并不能保证一个分类单元作为另一个分类单元的替代物会有效。在我们的案例中，高度多样化且分布狭窄的无脊椎动物作为预测指标比多样性较低且分布较广的脊椎动物更有效。
