Abstract 1. Species richness is unrivalled as the most reported biodiversity metric in ecological and conservation research. Unfortunately, species richness ignores the scale-dependency of biodiversity. 2. We propose the metric uniquity, a quantitative and spatially scalable measure of uniqueness of a site based on a species-by-site matrix and a site-by-habitat type classification with area weights for habitat types correcting for sampling biases. 3. An example of uniquity is presented using vascular plant data from 130 sites representing a larger region (Denmark). We demonstrate the importance of the scale parameter of uniquity for the prediction of independent uniqueness indices calculated from species distribution data and the number of recorded red listed species. 4. We compare the performance of uniquity with the performance of the indices Local Contribution to Beta Diversity (LCBD) and Range Rarity Richness (RRR), and we investigate its sensitivity to small sample size and poorly resolved habitat classification. 5. We assess the performance of the uniquity metric applied to DNA metabarcoding data for plants, fungi and eukaryotes from the same set of study sites. 6. Uniquity is a strong predictor of site uniqueness based on national distribution data and also correlates neatly with the observed number of red listed species. Uniquity based on DNA metabarcoding corresponds well with the number of red listed species observed. 7. Perspective: Uniquity is generally applicable to biotas sampled with comparable effort, including field inventories, trap sampling, and DNA metabarcoding data. To our knowledge uniquity is the first index of uniqueness that explicitly considers spatial scale and sampling biases, while simultaneously accepting non-annotated DNA-data as input. Based on our study we offer general recommendations for further use and testing of uniquity as conservation value metric.

中文翻译：

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唯一性：站点生物唯一性的一般度量

摘要 1. 作为生态和保护研究中报道最多的生物多样性指标，物种丰富度是无与伦比的。不幸的是，物种丰富度忽略了生物多样性的规模依赖性。2. 我们提出了度量唯一性，一种基于逐个站点矩阵和逐个栖息地类型分类的站点唯一性的定量和空间可扩展度量，具有栖息地类型的面积权重，可校正采样偏差。3. 使用来自代表更大区域（丹麦）的 130 个地点的维管植物数据展示了一个独特性的例子。我们证明了唯一性尺度参数对于预测独立唯一性指数的重要性，这些指数是根据物种分布数据和记录的红色物种数量计算得出的。4. 我们将唯一性的表现与 Beta 多样性的本地贡献 (LCBD) 和范围稀有丰富度 (RRR) 指数的表现进行了比较，我们调查了它对小样本量和栖息地分类解析不佳的敏感性。5. 我们评估了应用于来自同一组研究地点的植物、真菌和真核生物的 DNA 元条形码数据的唯一性度量的性能。6. 唯一性是基于国家分布数据的站点唯一性的强预测因子，并且还与观察到的红色列入物种的数量密切相关。基于 DNA 元条形码的唯一性与观察到的红色列出物种的数量非常吻合。7. 观点：Uniquity 通常适用于以可比努力采样的生物群，包括现场清单、陷阱采样和 DNA 元条形码数据。据我们所知，唯一性是唯一性的第一个指标，它明确考虑了空间尺度和采样偏差，同时接受未注释的 DNA 数据作为输入。根据我们的研究，我们提供了进一步使用和测试唯一性作为保护价值指标的一般建议。