<h4 id="questions-and-guidance-for-kraft-et-al-disentangling-the-drivers-of">Questions and Guidance for Kraft et al. Disentangling the Drivers of</h4>
<h4 id="beta-diversity-along-latitudinal-and-elevational-gradients">Beta Diversity Along Latitudinal and Elevational Gradients</h4>

<p>If the study of biodiversity patterns is new for you, this first paragraph may 
not make a lot of sense. Don’t panic. Because it is a short paper, it is not
taking the time to explain jargon and concepts. Today we’re focusing on the methods of this paper,
but by the end of the semester, this paragraph will be a lot more comprehensible. 
It’s okay if you don’t know the answers to the questions below. If you don’t, what is your best guess? 
Remember, being wrong in this class does not result in points taken away.</p>

<ul>
  <li>Conceptually, what are alpha, beta, and gamma diversity? How are they different?</li>
  <li>What are the three different measures of beta diversity discussed in this paper? Are any of these what you were expecting? Why?</li>
  <li>Were you surprised at how they measured beta-diversity? Were you expecting
a different approach?</li>
  <li>One of the most confusing things about biodiversity research is that there are often many different ways to approach calculating something and sometimes we assume what the author is doing based on our expectations. One of those confusion points is often with hwhat metric of beta diversity is being used. Another is how the data themselves are being used. Work through the design of this paper (focus on the elevational gradient example). How are samples distributed along the elevational gradient and how are they being used to calculate alpha, beta, gamma?</li>
  <li>What makes beta diversity complicated to interpret? Why?</li>
  <li>How do they try to deal with this problem with beta diversity?</li>
  <li>They make a brief statement in the main text about the size of the plots. In
the supplemental materials (where the methods are) they say this:
“As emphasized in the main text, the spatial scales at which we defined 
α- and gamma -diversity are smaller than typically have been used in the literature; this is a limitation of the data that are available.  However, the sampling issues that we explore here are general and not dependent on the scales used, particularly when the number of individuals in a local 
community is small.” Why do we need to think about the number of individuals
we’ve sampled when thinking about measuring diversity? (think about pulling marbles from
a jar)</li>
  <li>What do they conclude?</li>
  <li>After reading the paper, what are some of the concepts or ideas that were
new to you?</li>
</ul>