Martínez Santalla, SaraMartín Devasa, Ramiro MaríaGómez Rodríguez, CarolaCrujeiras Casais, Rosa MaríaBaselga Fraga, Andrés2022-09-202022-09-202022Journal of Biogeography. 2022;49:968–978http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29233Modelling how community similarity decays with spatial distance is a key tool for the study of the processes behind community variation (beta diversity). Distance-decay models are computed from pairwise metrics (i.e. community similarity and spatial distance between localities) and hence suffer from pairwise dependence in the data, precluding the use of standard significance tests. Besides, distance-decay patterns are inherently nonlinear because similarity is bounded between 1 and 0. However, the only standard method to assess model significance under pairwise dependency is the Mantel test, which considers a linear model. To allow the use of nonlinear models in the assessment of distance-decay patterns, we introduce here a nonlinear significance test combining a pseudo-R2 statistic with either permutations or block-site resampling with replacementeng© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Biogeography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are madeAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Beta diversityDistance-decay of similarityMantel testSignificance testSite-block resamplingSpatial turnoverjournal article1365-2699open access