Do environmental diversity approaches lead to improved site selection? A comparison with the multi-species approach

This paper suggests a new approach to select conservation areas cost-effectively according to the concept of complementarity and representation of focal natural features. The suggested environmental diversity (ED) site selection model maximizes ecological diversity, measured via ordination of the chosen taxa communities. Given their fundamental role in ecosystem functioning, vascular plants are chosen as the indicator taxa. We test the ED indicator model by contrasting it to the conventional site selection indicator (MS model), which maximizes the representation of species number in the indicator taxa. We demonstrate that the ED model is more cost-effective than the MS model. More importantly, while the ED selection is operative over the whole range of species, the MS selection does not work beyond the range of species, where all vascular plants become protected. Beyond that point MS indicator model cannot guide conservation efforts, which is a serious drawback. The ED model outperforms MS model also in terms of habitat conservation and taxonomic diversity. Thus, it provides an interesting selection framework for biodiversity.