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Habitat connectivity and in-stream vegetation control temporal variability of benthic invertebrate communities.

ABSTRACT: One of the key challenges to understanding patterns of ? diversity is to disentangle deterministic patterns from stochastic ones. Stochastic processes may mask the influence of deterministic factors on community dynamics, hindering identification of the mechanisms causing variation in community composition. We studied temporal ? diversity (among-year dissimilarity) of macroinvertebrate communities in near-pristine boreal streams across 14 years. To assess whether the observed ? diversity deviates from that expected by chance, and to identify processes (deterministic vs. stochastic) through which different explanatory factors affect community variability, we used a null model approach. We observed that at the majority of sites temporal ? diversity was low indicating high community stability. When stochastic variation was unaccounted for, connectivity was the only variable explaining temporal ? diversity, with weakly connected sites exhibiting higher community variability through time. After accounting for stochastic effects, connectivity lost importance, suggesting that it was related to temporal ? diversity via random colonization processes. Instead, ? diversity was best explained by in-stream vegetation, community variability decreasing with increasing bryophyte cover. These results highlight the potential of stochastic factors to dampen the influence of deterministic processes, affecting our ability to understand and predict changes in biological communities through time.

SUBMITTER: Huttunen KL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5431217 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Habitat connectivity and in-stream vegetation control temporal variability of benthic invertebrate communities.

Huttunen K-L KL Mykrä H H Oksanen J J Astorga A A Paavola R R Muotka T T

Scientific reports 20170503 1

One of the key challenges to understanding patterns of β diversity is to disentangle deterministic patterns from stochastic ones. Stochastic processes may mask the influence of deterministic factors on community dynamics, hindering identification of the mechanisms causing variation in community composition. We studied temporal β diversity (among-year dissimilarity) of macroinvertebrate communities in near-pristine boreal streams across 14 years. To assess whether the observed β diversity deviate ...[more]

PMID: 28469187

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Project description:BackgroundFreshwater ecosystems, such as streams, are facing increasing pressures from agricultural land use and recent literature stresses the importance of robust biomonitoring to detect trends in insect decline globally. Aquatic insects and other macroinvertebrates are often used as indicators of ecological condition in freshwater biomonitoring programs; however, these diverse groups can present challenges to morphological identification and coarse-level taxonomic resolution can mask patterns in community composition. Here, we incorporate molecular identification (DNA metabarcoding) into a stream biomonitoring sampling design to explore the diversity and variability of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities at small spatial scales. While individual stream reaches can be very heterogenous, most community ecology studies focus on larger, landscape-level patterns of community composition. A high degree of community variability at the local scale has important implications for both biomonitoring and ecological research, and the incorporation of DNA metabarcoding into local biodiversity assessments will inform future sampling protocols.ResultsWe sampled twenty streams in southern Ontario, Canada, for aquatic macroinvertebrates across multiple time points and assessed local community variability by comparing field replicates taken ten meters apart within the same stream. Using bulk-tissue DNA metabarcoding, we revealed that aquatic macroinvertebrate communities are highly diverse at small spatial scales with unprecedented levels of local taxonomic turnover. We detected over 1600 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) from 149 families, and a single insect family, the Chironomidae, contained over one third of the total number of OTUs detected in our study. Benthic communities were largely comprised of rare taxa detected only once per stream despite multiple biological replicates (24-94% rare taxa per site). In addition to numerous rare taxa, our species pool estimates indicated that there was a large proportion of taxa that remained undetected by our sampling regime (14-94% per site). Our sites were located across a gradient of agricultural activity, and while we predicted that increased land use would homogenize benthic communities, this was not supported as within-stream dissimilarity was unrelated to land use. Within-stream dissimilarity estimates were consistently high for all levels of taxonomic resolution (invertebrate families, invertebrate OTUs, chironomid OTUs), indicating stream communities are very dissimilar at small spatial scales.

Dataset Information

Habitat connectivity and in-stream vegetation control temporal variability of benthic invertebrate communities.

Publications

Habitat connectivity and in-stream vegetation control temporal variability of benthic invertebrate communities.

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