Abstract:

Abstract The biotas of archipelagos and fragmented habitats frequently show a nested structure. That is, the species on depauperate islands represent proper subsets of those on richer islands, and the set of biotas as a whole forms a nested series. Like the species-area relationship, nested structures are observed in many types of habitats and in many taxa. Nestedness has been suggested to have implications for biological conservation, particularly in relation to SLOSS (single large or several small) debate regarding nature reserve design. Several metrics have been proposed to measure nestedness, and several null hypotheses against which to evaluate the nestedness. The causality of nestedness has been investigated in many studies. While nestedness may be influenced by many factors, ultimately it must result from selective immigrations, selective extinctions or both. Because only species presence-absence data are required to perform nestedness analysis so that the data from most inventory programs can be utilized. Thus, this is a field which is worthy for us to do further work.