Data from: 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 intermediate productivity adds new empirical evidence to a
long-standing debate over biodiversity responses to productivity. Finally,
we discovered a dominant and positive response of fungi and insect
richness to organic matter accumulation and diversification (ecospace
expansion). Two simple models of producer and consumer richness accounted
for 77 % of the variation in multi-taxon species richness suggesting a
significant potential for generalization beyond individual species
responses. Our study widens the traditional conservation focus on
vegetation and vertebrate populations unravelling the importance of
diversification of carbon resources for diverse heterotrophs, such as
fungi and insects.