Are we asking too much of species data?

To conserve biodiversity, we need a clear picture of how it is distributed. Easier said than done! Biodiversity is a short word for a wide concept. Even just counting the number of species in a forest can be an overwhelming task if one considers all insects, spiders, birds, mites, (ticks!), lichens, fungi, isopoda and so on. Not only, some of these groups are very difficult to identify, so sampling them all would require hundreds of hours to a team of well-trained field biologists.

Can we rely on one or few groups of species to make inferences on all the other, then? Although the use of indicators is a well-established routing, how well these indicators work in Southern European beech forest is not clearly understood. One of the open questions is: How well do indicators work at different scales? In our new article “Congruence across taxa and spatial scales: Are we asking too much of species data?”, just published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, we tried to find an answer.