Regional Biomes outperform broader spatial units in capturing biodiversity responses to land-use change

Biogeographic context, such as biome type, has a critical influence on ecological resilience, as climatic and environmental conditions impact how communities respond to anthropogenic threats. For example, land-use change causes a greater loss of biodiversity in tropical biomes compared to temperate biomes. Furthermore, the nature of threats impacting ecosystems varies geographically. Therefore, monitoring the state of biodiversity at a high spatial resolution is crucial to capture variation in threat-responses caused by biogeographical context. However such fine-scale ecological data collection could be prohibitively resource intensive. In this study, we aim to find the spatial scale that could best capture variation in community-level threat responses whilst keeping data collection requirements feasible. Using a database of biodiversity records with extensive global coverage, we modelled species richness and total abundance (the responses) across land-use types (reflecting threats), co..., , , # Regional Biomes outperform broader spatial units in capturing biodiversity responses to land-use change

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dr7sqvb5m](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dr7sqvb5m)

## Description of the data and file structure

Analysing biodiversity responses to land use change across regional biomes

### Files and variables

Data must be downloaded from original sources and placed in this folder.

### PREDICTS data

This project uses data from the 2016 release of the PREDICTS database (Hudson et al., 2016). The dataset can be found at [https://doi.org/10.5519/0066354](https://doi.org/10.5519/0066354)

This analysis starts with the RDS format of the data, called 'database.rds'. Place this in a folder called 'PredictsData'

#### **Terrestrial Ecoregions of the world Map**

Ecoregion data was originally downloaded from the The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) conservation atlas ([http://maps.tnc.org/gis_data.html](http://maps.tnc.org/gis_data.html)). At the time of publishing, the li...