Towards Monitoring Biodiversity in Amazonian Forests: How Regular Samples Capture Meso-Scale Altitudinal Variation in 25 km2 Plots

Background: Ecological monitoring and sampling optima are context and location specific. Novel applications (e.g. biodiversity monitoring for environmental service payments) call for renewed efforts to establish reliable and robust monitoring in biodiversity rich areas. As there is little information on the distribution of biodiversity across the Amazon basin, we used altitude as a proxy for biological variables to test whether meso-scale variation can be adequately represented by different sample sizes in a standardized, regular-coverage sampling arrangement. Methodology/Principal Findings: We used Shuttle-Radar-Topography-Mission digital elevation values to evaluate if the regular sampling arrangement in standard RAPELD (rapid assessments (“RAP”) over the long-term (LTER [“PELD” in Portuguese])) grids captured patters in meso-scale spatial variation. The adequacy of different sample sizes (n = 4 to 120) were examined within 32,325 km2/3,232,500 ha (1293×25 km2 sample areas) distributed across the legal Brazilian Amazon. Kolmogorov-Smirnov-tests, correlation and root-mean-square-error were used to measure sample representativeness, similarity and accuracy respectively. Trends and thresholds of these responses in relation to sample size and standard-deviation were modeled using Generalized-Additive-Models and conditional-inference-trees respectively. We found that a regular arrangement of 30 samples captured the distribution of altitude values within these areas. Sample size was more important than sample standard deviation for representativeness and similarity. In contrast, accuracy was more strongly influenced by sample standard deviation. Additionally, analysis of spatially interpolated data showed that spatial patterns in altitude were also recovered within areas using a regular arrangement of 30 samples. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings show that the logistically feasible sample used in the RAPELD system successfully recovers meso-scale altitudinal patterns. This suggests that the sample size and regular arrangement may also be generally appropriate for quantifying spatial patterns in biodiversity at similar scales across at least 90% (≈5 million km2) of the Brazilian Amazon.