RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Partitioning plant spectral diversity into alpha and beta components
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 742080
DO 10.1101/742080
A1 Etienne Laliberté
A1 Anna K. Schweiger
A1 Pierre Legendre
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/29/742080.abstract
AB Plant spectral diversity — how plants differentially interact with solar radiation — is an integrator of plant chemical, structural, and taxonomic diversity that can be remotely sensed. We propose to measure spectral diversity as spectral variance, which allows the partitioning of the spectral diversity of a region, called spectral gamma (γ) diversity, into additive alpha (α; within communities) and beta (β; among communities) components. Our method calculates the contributions of individual bands or spectral features to spectral γ-, β-, and α-diversity, as well as the contributions of individual plant communities to spectral diversity. We present two case studies illustrating how our approach can identify “hotspots” of spectral α-diversity within a region, and discover spectrally unique areas that contribute strongly to β-diversity. Partitioning spectral diversity and mapping its spatial components has many applications for conservation since high local diversity and distinctiveness in composition are two key criteria used to determine the ecological value of ecosystems.