TY - JOUR T1 - Resolving the species pool dependence of beta-diversity using coverage-based rarefaction JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.04.14.040402 SP - 2020.04.14.040402 AU - Thore Engel AU - Shane A. Blowes AU - Daniel J. McGlinn AU - Felix May AU - Nicholas J. Gotelli AU - Brian J. McGill AU - Jonathan M. Chase Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/14/2020.04.14.040402.abstract N2 - Biodiversity is non-randomly distributed in space and understanding how spatial structure of species diversity responds to ecological, biogeographic and anthropogenic drivers is one of the major quests of modern ecology. However, metrics of community differentiation such as Whittaker’s beta-diversity fail to unambiguously capture species turnover when they are compared across assemblages with changing species pool sizes, species abundance distributions and numbers of individuals. This is due to an effect of changing sample completeness.Here, we propose a method that combines the benefits of individual-based and coverage based rarefaction to standardize beta-diversity estimates by sample completeness at the gamma-scale. We test the performance of our metric, βC, using simulations of spatially explicit communities that change both species pool size and intraspecific spatial aggregation. Additionally, we re-analyse the “Gentry” plot dataset to investigate patterns of tree beta-diversity along a latitudinal gradient.We find that our metric, βC, captures changes in intraspecific aggregation independent of changes in the species pool size, while Whittaker’s beta-diversity and standardized estimates based on the number of individuals respond to species pool size as well as spatial aggregation. Our coverage-based estimates of beta-diversity do not exhibit a latitudinal pattern in the empirical tree dataset.Our simulations show that coverage-based standardization of beta-diversity offers a powerful tool for the unraveling of spatial and compositional biodiversity change. Potential applications of the approach range from a better description of basic biogeographic diversity patterns to the consolidation of local and regional diversity trends in the current biodiversity crisis.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -