Move mountains - contribute your data to MoMoB
Background
Biodiversity changes along elevational gradients are among the most frequently studied phenomena in biogeography. Generations of explorers, climbers and scientist have been fascinated by the drastic changes of flora and fauna that can be experienced on a walk from the foot of a mountain to the summit. These changes can have many faces: Species turnover, functional turnover, changes in relative abundances, total number of individuals, etc, etc... And all of that in different taxa. Yes, biodiversity is an inherently multidimensional concept. However, traditionally most studies center around the question of how species richness responds to elevational gradients. The literature is full of exciting studies that report declines of species richness with altitude or hump-shaped species richness patterns in different mountains all over the world.
There are great meta-analyses that have synthesized the literature on elevational gradients, but they are usually confined to the limited number of effect sizes and biodiversity measures reported by the original studies (e.g species richness). After all, the trend of publishing raw data is only very recent. Yet, many of the original data are still around and they can do more! If you are reading this, there are good chances that you've conducted valuable research in mountains and own such relevant data. Maybe they are in your drawer, maybe you maintain a well organized Excel spreadsheet, maybe you've forgotten them on that laptop that you stopped using a couple of years ago, or perhaps you kept them in the appendix of your PhD thesis. Wouldn't it be nice to make your data findable and reusable?
The MoMoB project
MoMoB stands for Mountains and Measurements of Biodiversity. The project aims to synthesize elevational gradients in biodiversity across scales and taxa. Using raw species abundance data we are able to measure components of biodiversity that go beyond species richness changes at a single scale.
Specifically, the objectives of MoMoB are twofold:
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Compile a database of site by species matrices along elevational gradients to be published as a datapaper. This will ensure your data can be found by others and have a longlasting impact.
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Conduct a global synthesis of elevational patterns in components of species diversity (i.e. Number of individuals, species abundance distribution, intraspecific aggregation). What underlies the frequently reported species richness trends? Do the patterns differ among taxa, biogeographic regions or scales?
If you like what we are doing, please, consider contributing your data. We are looking for species abundance data collected along elevational gradients (e.g. Site-by-Species matrices). We invite you to get in touch with us to dicuss this project.
Preliminary results
We have already compiled a small data-base from the open source literature. We find great variability in biodiversity patters between studies. Species richness patterns at a single scale can be dissected into changes in number of individuals (N) and changes in the Species abundance distribution (S_PIE).
Figure: Measurements of Biodiversity along elevational gradients. number of individuals (N), observed species richness (S_obs) and evenness (S_PIE). Colours represent different studies that we compiled from the literature. The black line is the global trend accross studies and taxa
Who is behind MoMoB?
MoMoB is a project of the Biodiversity Synthesis lab at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). It is led by Thore Engel (PhD student) under the supervision of Jonathan Chase (PI).
Visit our website to find out more about us.
For questions and data contributions, please email: thore.engel@idiv.de