Improving biodiversity predictions is essential if we are to meet the challenges posed by global change. As knowledge is key to feed models, we need to evaluate how debated theory can affect models. An important ongoing debate is whether environmental constraints limit the number of species that can coexist in a community (saturation), with recent findings suggesting that species richness in many communities might be unsaturated. Here, we propose that biodiversity models could address this issue by accounting for a duality: considering communities as unsaturated but where species composition is constrained by different scale-dependent biodiversity drivers. We identify a variety of promising advances for incorporating this duality into commonly applied biodiversity modelling approaches and improving their spatial predictions.

如果我们要应对全球变化带来的挑战，就必须改善生物多样性的预测。由于知识是提供模型的关键，因此我们需要评估争论的理论如何影响模型。正在进行的一个重要辩论是环境限制是否限制了一个社区可以共存的物种数量（饱和度），最近的发现表明，许多社区的物种丰富度可能是不饱和的。在这里，我们建议生物多样性模型可以通过考虑双重性来解决这个问题：将社区视为不饱和的，但是物种组成受到不同规模依赖的生物多样性驱动因素的约束。我们确定了将这种二元性纳入常用生物多样性建模方法并改善其空间预测的各种有前途的进展。