Interspecific spatial associations (ISA), which include co-occurrences, segregations, or attractions among two or more species, can provide important insights into the spatial structuring of communities. However, ISA has primarily been examined in the context of understanding interspecific interactions, while other aspects of ISA, including its relations to other biodiversity facets and how it changes in the face of anthropogenic pressures, have been largely neglected. This is likely because it is unclear what makes ISA useful in a biodiversity context, little is known about the theoretical connections between ISA and other biodiversity facets, and there is a confusing variety of approaches to measuring ISA. Here, we first review the metrics of ISA. These include spatially implicit and explicit indices of association for binary, abundance, and point pattern data. We test and compare these approaches on empirical and simulated data, and we provide recommendations for how to use and interpret them in biodiversity science. We argue that measurements of ISA are more informative when they are spatially explicit (i.e., distance dependent). We then review links of ISA to other classical biodiversity facets, such as alpha, beta, and gamma diversity, and show that they mostly fail to reflect changes/variation in ISA, with the exception of average pairwise beta diversity. This underscores the need for a specific focus on ISA in large-scale biodiversity assessments. Finally, we argue that there are important, and underappreciated, reasons to study ISA that are unrelated to its link to biotic interactions. Specifically, ISA can provide strong tests of biodiversity theories that require multiple patterns to benchmark against, and it can be explored for potentially predictive macroecological patterns.

中文翻译：

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作为生物多样性的一个方面的种间空间关联的测量和分析

种间空间关联 (ISA)，包括两个或多个物种之间的共现、隔离或吸引力，可以提供对群落空间结构的重要见解。然而，ISA 主要是在理解种间相互作用的背景下进行研究的，而 ISA 的其他方面，包括其与其他生物多样性方面的关系以及它在面对人为压力时如何变化，在很大程度上被忽视了。这可能是因为尚不清楚是什么使 ISA 在生物多样性背景下有用，对 ISA 与其他生物多样性方面之间的理论联系知之甚少，并且测量 ISA 的方法多种多样。在这里，我们首先回顾 ISA 的指标。这些包括二元、丰度、和点图案数据。我们在经验数据和模拟数据上测试和比较这些方法，并就如何在生物多样性科学中使用和解释它们提供建议。我们认为，当 ISA 的测量在空间上是明确的（即，距离相关）时，它们的信息量更大。然后，我们回顾了 ISA 与其他经典生物多样性方面的联系，例如 alpha、beta 和 gamma 多样性，并表明它们大多无法反映 ISA 的变化/变化，但平均成对 beta 多样性除外。这强调了在大规模生物多样性评估中需要特别关注 ISA。最后，我们认为研究 ISA 有一些重要且未被充分认识的理由，这些理由与其与生物相互作用的联系无关。具体来说，