A spatially explicit measure of beta diversity

Plant communities are generally spatially structured. Therefore, in order to enhance the interpretation of distance-dependent community patterns, spatially explicit measures of beta-diversity are needed that, besides simple species turnover, are able to account for the rate at which biological similarity decays with increasing distance. We show that a multivariate semivariogram computed from species presence and absence data can be considered as a space-dependent alternative to existing definitions of beta-diversity. To illustrate how the proposed method works, we used a classical data set from a second-growth piedmont hardwood forest.