Biodiversity trends are stronger in marine than terrestrial assemblages

Shane Blowes, Sarah Supp, Laura Antao, Amanda Bates, Helge Bruelheide, Jonathan Chase, Faye Moyes, Anne Magurran, Brian McGill, Isla Myers-Smith, Marten Winter, Anne Bjorkman, Diana Bowler, Jarrett EK Byrnes, Andrew Gonzalez, Jes Hines, Forest Isbell, Holly Jones, Laetitia Navarro, Patrick Thompson, Mark Vellend, Conor Waldock, Maria Dornelas
bioRxiv, October 30th, 2018
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/457424
Overview and take-home messages:
Blowes et altackle an impressive and large undertaking in this paper by attempting to disentangle global biodiversity trends through a meta-analysis of data from 358 studies. By dividing the available data by biome and taxa, the authors were able to detect different biodiversity trends in marine and terrestrial biomes. Tropical marine biomes, particularly the Caribbean, have a more negative deviation from the mean trend in species richness and more positive deviations from the overall trend in species turnover--species are turning over more quickly in marine biomes. The analyses demonstrate that mean local species richness is not decreasing, but many individual regions deviate significantly from the overall mean. The results have important implications for how we discuss changes in biodiversity in the anthropocene, but it is important to make clear that locally static species richness does not equate to globally static species richness, and species are going extinct at an alarming rate. Overall, this paper presents careful analyses and is clearly written, however, there are a few issues that, if addressed, we feel could improve future versions of the manuscript.