Multi-taxon inventory reveals highly consistent biodiversity responses to ecospace variation

Amidst the global biodiversity crisis, identifying general principles for variation in biodiversity remains a key challenge. Scientific consensus is limited to a few macroecological rules, such as species richness increasing with area, which provide limited guidance for conservation. In fact, few agreed ecological principles apply at the scale of sites or reserve management, partly because most community-level studies are restricted to single habitat types and species groups. We used the recently proposed ecospace framework and a comprehensive data set for aggregating environmental variation to predict multi-taxon diversity. We studied richness of plants, fungi, and arthropods in 130 sites representing the major terrestrial habitat types in Denmark. We found the abiotic environment (ecospace position) to be pivotal for the richness of primary producers (vascular plants, mosses, and lichens) and, more surprisingly, little support for ecospace continuity as a driver. A peak in richness at...