Code and publicly available data sets from A test of Conserving Nature's Stage: protecting a diversity of geophysical traits can also support a diversity of species at a landscape scale

Conserving Nature's Stage (CNS) is a concept from conservation planning that promotes the protection of areas encompassing a broad range of enduring geophysical traits to provide long-term habitat for diverse species. The efficacy of using enduring geophysical characteristics as surrogates for biodiversity, independent of non-geophysical features and when considering finer resolution area selections, has yet to be investigated. Here, we evaluated CNS using 33 fine-scale inventories of vascular plant, non-vascular plant, invertebrate or vertebrate species from 13 areas across three continents. For each inventory, we estimated a continuous multidimensional surrogate defined from topographic and soil estimates of the surveyed plots. We assessed surrogate effectiveness of by comparing the species representation of surrogate selected plots to the representation from plots picked randomly and using species information. We then used correlation coefficients to assess the link between the performance and qualities of the inventories, surroundings and surrogates. The CNS surrogate showed positive performance for 24 of the 33 inventories, and among these tests, represented 28 more species than random and 83% of the total number of species on average. We also found a small number of weak correlations between performance and environmental variability, as well as qualities of the surrogate. Our study demonstrates that prioritizing areas for a variety of geophysical characteristics will, in most cases, promote the representation of species. Our findings also point to areas for future research that might enhance CNS surrogacy.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Geodiversity science for society’.

自然舞台保存（CNS）是保护规划中的一个概念，它倡导保护包含广泛持久地质特性的区域，以提供长期多样的物种栖息地。利用持久地质特性作为生物多样性的替代指标，无论非地质特性如何，以及考虑到更精细的面积选择分辨率时，其有效性尚未得到充分研究。在本研究中，我们利用来自三个大陆13个区域的33个细粒度植物、非植物、无脊椎动物或脊椎动物物种的样本，对CNS进行了评估。对于每个样本，我们根据调查地块的地形和土壤估计值，估计了一个连续的多维替代指标。通过比较替代选择地块中的物种代表性以及随机选择地块的代表性，我们评估了替代指标的有效性。随后，我们利用相关系数来评估调查、周边环境和替代指标之间的联系。在33个样本中，CNS替代指标对24个样本表现出了积极的性能，在这些测试中，平均比随机选择的样本多代表了28种物种，占总物种数的83%。我们还发现，性能与环境变异性以及替代指标的质量之间存在少量弱相关性。我们的研究表明，优先考虑具有各种地质特性的区域，在大多数情况下，将促进物种的代表性。我们的发现还指向了未来研究可能增强CNS替代性的领域。本文是Theo Murphy会议专题‘地理多样性科学与社会’的一部分。