Conserving Nature's Stage (CNS) is a concept from conservation planning that promotes the protection of areas encompassing a broad range of enduring geophysical traits to provide long-term habitat for diverse species. The efficacy of using enduring geophysical characteristics as surrogates for biodiversity, independent of non-geophysical features and when considering finer resolution area selections, has yet to be investigated. Here, we evaluated CNS using 33 fine-scale inventories of vascular plant, non-vascular plant, invertebrate or vertebrate species from 13 areas across three continents. For each inventory, we estimated a continuous multidimensional surrogate defined from topographic and soil estimates of the surveyed plots. We assessed surrogate effectiveness by comparing the species representation of surrogate selected plots to the representation from plots picked randomly and using species information. We then used correlation coefficients to assess the link between the performance and qualities of the inventories, surroundings and surrogates. The CNS surrogate showed positive performance for 24 of the 33 inventories, and among these tests, represented 28 more species than random and 83% of the total number of species on average. We also found a small number of weak correlations between performance and environmental variability, as well as qualities of the surrogate. Our study demonstrates that prioritizing areas for a variety of geophysical characteristics will, in most cases, promote the representation of species. Our findings also point to areas for future research that might enhance CNS surrogacy. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Geodiversity for science and society’.

中文翻译：

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保护自然阶段的测试：保护地球物理特征的多样性也可以在景观尺度上支持物种的多样性

保护自然阶段 (CNS) 是保护规划中的一个概念，旨在促进对包含广泛持久地球物理特征的区域进行保护，为不同物种提供长期栖息地。使用持久的地球物理特征作为生物多样性替代品的有效性，独立于非地球物理特征，并且在考虑更高分辨率的区域选择时，还有待研究。在这里，我们使用来自三大洲 13 个地区的 33 个维管植物、非维管植物、无脊椎动物或脊椎动物物种的精细清单来评估中枢神经系统。对于每个清单，我们估计了根据调查地块的地形和土壤估计定义的连续多维替代值。我们通过将替代选择的地块的物种代表性与随机选取的地块的代表性进行比较并使用物种信息来评估替代有效性。然后，我们使用相关系数来评估库存、环境和替代物的性能和质量之间的联系。CNS 替代品在 33 个清单中的 24 个中表现出积极的性能，在这些测试中，代表的物种比随机的多 28 个，平均占物种总数的 83%。我们还发现，表现与环境变化以及替代者的品质之间存在少量弱相关性。我们的研究表明，在大多数情况下，根据各种地球物理特征优先考虑区域将促进物种的代表性。我们的研究结果还指出了未来可能增强中枢神经系统代孕的研究领域。本文是西奥·墨菲会议问题“科学与社会的地理多样性”的一部分。