Scale (ratio)

Global change

Ecology

Biology

Foraging

Diversity (politics)

Cartography

Psychological resilience

Nestedness

Spatial ecology

Beta diversity

Anthropology

Environmental change

Gamma diversity

Climate change

Psychology

Geography

Environmental resource management

Psychotherapist

Sociology

Environmental science

Biodiversity

Temporal scales

Nature Communications

Estimates of recent biodiversity change remain inconsistent, debated, and infrequently assessed for their functional implications. Here, we report that spatial scale and type of biodiversity measurement influence evidence of temporal biodiversity change. We show a pervasive scale dependence of temporal trends in taxonomic (TD) and functional (FD) diversity for an ~50-year record of avian assemblages from North American Breeding Bird Survey and a record of global extinctions. Average TD and FD increased at all but the global scale. Change in TD exceeded change in FD toward large scales, signaling functional resilience. Assemblage temporal dissimilarity and turnover (replacement of species or functions) declined, while nestedness (tendency of assemblages to be subsets of one another) increased with scale. Patterns of FD change varied strongly among diet and foraging guilds. We suggest that monitoring, policy, and conservation require a scale-explicit framework to account for the pervasive effect that scale has on perceived biodiversity change.

Taxonomic and functional diversity change is scale dependent