Efficient biodiversity monitoring: Which taxonomic level to study?

Nowadays that biodiversity monitoring is a legal obligation in many countries, monitoring implementation still lags behind the needs for efficient conservation. This is mainly due to three limiting factors that are rarely available for an exhaustive diversity survey, i.e. time consuming, expensive and demands high level of expertise. We propose an alternative monitoring scheme based on the higher taxon approach. This approach allows rapid tracking of biodiversity changes and the utilization of data collected by non-expert volunteers. Here we show, for the first time, that temporal changes in genera or family richness are strongly correlated to, and have similar spatial pattern characteristics as changes in species richness for the breeding birds in New York State. Changes in genera richness proved more reliable in predicting changes in species richness than changes in family richness.