Higher-order dissimilarity in biodiversity: Identifying dissimilarities of spatial or temporal dissimilarity structures

Abstract

AbstractElucidating biodiversity patterns and their background processes is critical in biodiversity science. Dissimilarity, which is calculated based on multivariate biological quantities, is a major component of biodiversity. As the availability of spatial and temporal biodiversity information increases, the scope of dissimilarity studies has been expanded to cover various levels and types of spatio-temporal biodiversity facets (e.g. gene, community, and ecosystem function), and diverse pairwise dissimilarity indices have been developed. However, further development of the dissimilarity concept is required in comparative studies on spatio-temporal structures of biodiversity compositional patterns, such as those exploring commonalities of biogeographical boundaries among taxa, compared to the conventional ones to consider higher dimensions of dissimilarity: dissimilarity of dissimilarity structures. This study proposes a novel and general concept, high-order dissimilarity (HOD), for quantitatively evaluating the dissimilarities of spatial or temporal dissimilarity structures among different datasets, proposes specific implementation of HOD as operational indices, and illustrates potential resolution of scientific and practical questions by means of HOD. Our conceptual framework on HOD extends the existing framework of biodiversity science, and is versatile, with many potential applications in the acquisition of more valuable information from ever-increasing biodiversity data.