In nature, when local and regional species diversity value equals 1 (slope = 1), then all the species within a region will be found in all communities in that region thus the slope will be linear, but because this is species richness and not diversity, it is impossible to have more species in a local community than the region as a whole . However, this could also happen in nature only if the axis’ were different. For example, instead of intervals of two, it would have to be 5, 10 , 50, 100, 200 on the x axis, to show the large increase in regional species richness. It would not be a linear scale, and this one is. It is not actually greater than 1.
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