betapart: an R package for the study of beta diversity

1. Beta diversity, that is, the variation in species composition among sites, can be the result of species replacement between sites (turnover) and species loss from site to site (nestedness). 2. We present betapart, an R package for computing total dissimilarity as Sorensen or Jaccard indices, as well as their respective turnover and nestedness components. 3. betapart allows the assessment of spatial patterns of beta diversity using multiple-site dissimilarity measures accounting for compositional heterogeneity across several sites or pairwise measures providing distance matrices accounting for the multivariate structure of dissimilarity. 4. betapart also allows computing patterns of temporal difference in assemblage composition, and its turnover and nestedness components. 5. Several example analyses are shown, using the data included in the package, to illustrate the relevance of separating the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity to infer different mechanisms behind biodiversity patterns.