Aim Understanding complex ecological phenomena, such as the determinants of species richness, is best achieved by investigating their properties at different spatial scales. Factors significantly affecting the number of species occurring at one scale may not impact on richness at other scales. While this scale dependence has become increasingly recognized, there still remains a need to elucidate exactly how richness is structu...

Dengler ( Journal of Biogeography , 2009, 36 , 728–744) addresses issues regarding species–area relationships (SARs), but fails to settles those issues. He states that only certain types of sampling schemes should be used to construct SARs, but is not consistent in the criteria that he uses to include some sampling schemes but not others. He argues that a sampling scheme of contiguous plots will be more accurate in extrapolati...

Urbanization can have profound effects on the plant communities persisting in remnant habitats. That process can be explored by examining patterns of nestedness. Species composition for a set of communities exhibits a nested pattern if species present in progressively richer assemblages form a series of subsets. Nestedness can form as a result of the dynamic processes of extinction or colonization. It can also reflect a nested...

Scheiner (2003) presented a classification of species–area curves into six types based on the pattern of sampling and how the data are combined to form the curves. Gray et al . (2004) contended that five of those types should be termed ‘species‐accumulation curves’, reserving ‘species–area curve’ for those based on island‐type data. Their proposition contradicts 70 years of usage and confounds curves that are area‐explicit wit...

Macroecological studies infer ecological processes based on observed patterns. An often used measure of pattern is the species‐area curve. Insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of methods used to construct those curves. There are six different methods based on different combinations of: (1) the pattern of quadrats or areas sampled (nested, contiguous, noncontiguous, or island); (2) whether successively larger are...