LIFEPLAN: A worldwide biodiversity sampling design

up in many parts of the world (Fig 3A). Other practical considerations used to restrict site selection included accessibility, security, financial constraints and land ownership. National design The National scale was the intermediate between the Global and Nested scales. At this scale we do not alternate between a natural and urban location, and have instead chosen natural type Fig 1. Locations of LIFEPLAN sites around the world. Global sites are shown as black dots. The dense clusters of points without fill in Madagascar and the Nordic countries are the sites forming the National and Nested designs. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313353.g001 Fig 2. Histogram of actual distances within site pairs. In choosing natural / urban site pairs, we aimed for a distance of 20–50 km within pairs. Finding a natural / urban site pair 20–50 km apart that was also accessible and otherwise comparable was not always possible, and we accepted some site pairs that fell outside this range if the locations were otherwise valuable in terms of global coverage. The actual distribution of distances within the finally selected site pairs is shown here. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313353.g002 PLOS ONE LIFEPLAN: A worldwide biodiversity sampling design PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313353 December 31, 2024 5 / 15