Assessing the conservation priority of freshwater lake sites based on taxonomic, functional and environmental uniqueness

Aim We propose a novel approach that considers taxonomic uniqueness, functional uniqueness and environmental uniqueness and show how it can be used in guiding conservation planning. We illustrate the approach using data for lake biota and environment. Location Lake Puruvesi, Finland. Methods We sampled macrophytes and macroinvertebrates from the same 18 littoral sites. By adapting the original “ecological uniqueness” approach, we used distance-based methods to calculate measures of taxonomic (LCBD–t), functional (LCBD–f) and environmental (LCEH) uniqueness for each site. We also considered the numbers and locations of the sites needed to protect up to 70% of total variation in taxonomic, fu…