Fig. 1

Simulated β- and γ-diversity relationships between the population and species levels of organisation across three measures of diversity; richness, phylogenetic diversity (PD), and mean pairwise distance (MPD). The grey dashed line represents a 1:1 positive relationship between the two levels, whilst the black solid lines represent the simulated relationship found through a significant (p < 0.05) simple linear regression. a All β-diversity relationships are positive, and b all but richness γ-diversity relationships are negative. Dark colours represent higher relative species diversity and lighter colours represent higher relative population diversity. All diversity measures have been log-transformed for both the regressions and visualisation. Figure data are available in Additional file 4