Beta Diversity Partitioning

Beta diversity partitioning quantifies how species composition differs among sites, decomposing community dissimilarity into two components: species turnover (replacement of species across sites) and nestedness (loss of species from species-rich sites). Developed by Baselga (2010), this framework reveals whether sites differ because they have different species (turnover) or because some sites are subsets of others (nestedness). This distinction has ecological and conservation implications: turnover suggests environmental heterogeneity or speciation, while nestedness suggests habitat loss or extinction.