Data Defensibility and Gap Analysis
Thomas C. Edwards · BioScience · 1996
improved wildlife distribution modeling over large areas.The authors rightly warn against using coarse-grained maps of predicted vertebrate species richness as a surrogate for total biodiversity.We must point out, however, that species richness has seen decreasing use in CAP.For many of the reasons that Short and Hestbeck provide, most GAP investigators have analyzed patterns in faunal similarity as opposed to identifying hot spots in predicted richness.We would add to the authors' list of concerns about richness as a measure of biodiversity that patterns in species richness can be sensitive not only to the scale of the habitat map but also to the size of grid cells used to estimate richness (Stoms 1994).