ArticleEcological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America2026
Informing indicator species selection by combining species associations and environmental responses.
Article in Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Informing indicator species selection by combining species associations and environmental responses.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Biodiversity is changing at an unprecedented pace, underscoring the need for effective and scalable ecological monitoring. Yet selecting which species to monitor remains a major challenge. Indicator species can offer cost-effective proxies for broader biodiversity trends, but there is a critical gap in robust, data-driven approaches to identify them across complex and rapidly changing ecosystems shaped by climate, land management, and their interactions. We provide a model-based approach to select potential indicator species to monitor boreal understory communities, which are crucial part of forest biodiversity but often not as continuously monitored as trees. We focus on vascular plants due to their associations with multiple taxa. With joint species distribution models, we investigate species-species and species-environment relationships across Finland, utilizing nationwide understory vegetation data covering nearly 3000 study sites across different soil types and bioclimatic zones together with key environmental factors representing climate, habitat, and forest management. Species' associations and environmental responses differed between mineral soils and peatlands and across bioclimatic zones. We ranked species based on their association with other species and environmental responsiveness and observed that some species responded strongly to both, whereas many species were more related to one aspect than the other. Furthermore, we show that considering the effect of forest conditions together with the climate variables is important as they represent interdependent effects on biodiversity. Our study provides a robust framework for selecting indicator species that could be used in a wide range of biodiversity monitoring purposes and ecosystems, such as national forest monitoring programs. Combining information on species co-occurrences and environmental responses allows identifying species that are informative of both local community composition and broader environmental change supporting more informed and efficient indicator selection.
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Registered trials
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