How should we quantify global biodiversity change?
Nick Gotelli and Brian McGill came to visit us in St Andrews during the last week of May. We spent a week discussing different ways we can quantify change in biological diversity. To get us in the right spirit we went to look at fossil tree stumps in Crail, which were alive 335 million years ago!
We discussed what kinds of data we need, different types of bias in the data, what metrics to use, what are good null models of change and how to quantify change in multiple diversity dimensions.