Refereed Article Testing common habitat-based surrogates of
invertebrate diversity in a semi-arid rangeland  Citation:
Gollan JR, Ashcroft MB, Cassis G, Donnelly AP, Lassau S. 2009.
Testing common habitat-based surrogates of invertebrate
diversity in a semi-arid rangeland. Biodiversity and
Conservation. 18. 1147-1159.   Habitat-based surrogates are a
low cost alternative to intensive biodiversity surveys, though
they have been poorly investigated in semi-arid ecosystem
compared to others such as temperate woodlands. In this study we
tested potential habitat-based surrogates of invertebrate
richness in a semi-arid rangeland in northwest Australia.
Potential surrogates were: distance from artificial watering-
point; soil hardness; habitat complexity; and individual
complexity components. Generalised additive models (GAMs) were
used to relate abundance and richness of selected invertebrates
with environmental factors and cluster analysis was used to
examine similarity in species composition. The most frequently s