New paper about dark diversity affinity

Juni and Meelis have just published a new paper about Dark Diversity Affinity (DDA) in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This paper proposed a metric, DDA, to scale affinities of species and sites forming dark diversity. This metric has the potential to be used as an indicator of species local extinction risks and site conservation or restoration priorities. Using metacommunity presence/absence observations together with species functional traits and site characteristics, DDA can be estimated by the species-site unified model developed in this paper by applying the Bayesian statistics approach. From modelling exercises on nine empirical datasets covering a range of taxonomic groups, the study demonstrates how the framework can reveal the underlying mechanisms of dark diversity formations via species and site characteristics. The paper also includes R & JAGS codes to perform the analyses using example datasets.

Fujinuma, J., & Pärtel, M. 2023. Decomposing dark diversity affinities of species and sites using Bayesian method: What accounts for absences of species at suitable sites? Methods in Ecology and Evolution doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.14109.