Partitioning the temporal changes in abundance-based beta diversity into loss and gain components

ABSTRACT Spatial variation in species composition, or beta diversity, play central roles in gauging the structure of ecological communities. Here, we develop a new numerical method to partition the impacts of abundance losses and gains on the temporal changes in spatial beta diversity. We show that the temporal changes in pairwise dissimilarity measures (Ružicka and Bray–Curtis indices) and a multiple-site measure (normalized Whittaker’s beta) can be partitioned into six terms that reflect the losses and gains in species abundance. Our new method provides a unified approach to disentangle the temporal dynamics of spatial community structure by means of either incidence- or abundance-based data.