Dataset Information

The trinity of ecological contrasts: a case study on rich insect assemblages by means of species, functional and phylogenetic diversity measures.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The 'classical' concept of species diversity was extended in the last decades into other dimensions focusing on the functional and phylogenetic diversity of communities. These measures are often argued to allow a deeper understanding of the mechanisms shaping community assembly along environmental gradients. Because of practical impediments, thus far only very few studies evaluated the performance of these diversity measures on large empirical data sets. Here, data on species-rich riparian moth communities under different flood regimes and from three different rivers has been used to compare the power of various diversity measures to uncover ecological contrasts. RESULTS:Contrary to the expectation, classical metrics of species diversity (Hill numbers N1, N2 and Ninf) and evenness (Buzas-Gibson's E and Pielous's J) turned out to be the most powerful measures in unravelling the two gradients investigated in this study (e.g. flood regime and region). Several measures of functional and phylogenetic diversity tended to depict either only one or none of these contrasts. Rao's Q behaved similarly as species diversity and evenness. NTI and NRI showed a similar pattern among each other but, were different to all the other measures. Functional Divergence also behaved idiosyncratically across the 28 moth communities. The community weighted means of nearly all individual functional traits showed significant ecological patterns, supporting the relevance of the selected traits in shaping assemblage compositions. CONCLUSIONS:Species diversity and evenness measures turned out to be the most powerful metrics and clearly reflected both investigated environmental contrasts. This poses the question when it is useful to compile the additional data necessary for the calculation of additional diversity measures, since assembling trait bases and community phylogenies often requires a high work load. Apart from these methodological issues, most of the diversity measures related to communities of terrestrial insects like moths increased in forests that still are subject to flooding dynamics. This emphasizes the high conservation value of riparian forests and the importance of keeping and restoring river dynamics as a means of fostering also terrestrial biodiversity in floodplain areas.

SUBMITTER: Guariento E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7211340 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The trinity of ecological contrasts: a case study on rich insect assemblages by means of species, functional and phylogenetic diversity measures.

Guariento Elia E Strutzenberger Patrick P Truxa Christine C Fiedler Konrad K

BMC ecology 20200510 1

<h4>Background</h4>The 'classical' concept of species diversity was extended in the last decades into other dimensions focusing on the functional and phylogenetic diversity of communities. These measures are often argued to allow a deeper understanding of the mechanisms shaping community assembly along environmental gradients. Because of practical impediments, thus far only very few studies evaluated the performance of these diversity measures on large empirical data sets. Here, data on species- ...[more]

PMID: 32389122

Similar Datasets

Project description:Increasing evidence has emerged for non-random spatial distributions of microbes, but knowledge of the processes that cause variation in microbial assemblage among ecosystems is lacking. For instance, some studies showed that deterministic processes such as habitat specialization are important, while other studies hold that bacterial communities are assembled by stochastic forces. Here we examine the relative influence of deterministic and stochastic processes for bacterial communities from subsurface environments, stream biofilm, lake water, lake sediment and soil using pyrosequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene. We show that there is a general pattern in phylogenetic signal in species ecological niches across recent evolutionary time for all studied habitats, enabling us to infer the influences of community assembly processes from patterns of phylogenetic turnover in community composition. The phylogenetic dissimilarities among-habitat types were significantly higher than within them, and the communities were clustered according to their original habitat types. For communities within-habitat types, the highest phylogenetic turnover rate through space was observed in subsurface environments, followed by stream biofilm on mountainsides, whereas the sediment assemblages across regional scales showed the lowest turnover rate. Quantifying phylogenetic turnover as the deviation from a null expectation suggested that measured environmental variables imposed strong selection on bacterial communities for nearly all sample groups. For three sample groups, spatial distance reflected unmeasured environmental variables that impose selection, as opposed to spatial isolation. Such characterization of spatial and environmental variables proved essential for proper interpretation of partial Mantel results based on observed beta diversity metrics. In summary, our results clearly indicate a dominant role of deterministic processes on bacterial assemblages and highlight that bacteria show strong habitat associations that have likely emerged through evolutionary adaptation.

Project description:Understanding the influences of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering on the structure of ecological communities is a major challenge in ecology. Insight may be gained by combining phylogenetic, functional and taxonomic data to characterize spatial turnover in community structure (?-diversity). We develop a framework that allows rigorous inference of the strengths of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering by combining these three types of ?-diversity. Our framework provides model-generated expectations for patterns of taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional ?-diversity across biologically relevant combinations of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering. After developing the framework we compared the model-generated expectations to the commonly used "intuitive" expectation that the variance explained by the environment or by space will, respectively, increase monotonically with the strength of environmental filtering or dispersal limitation. The model-generated expectations strongly departed from these intuitive expectations: the variance explained by the environment or by space was often a unimodal function of the strength of environmental filtering or dispersal limitation, respectively. Therefore, although it is commonly done in the literature, one cannot assume that the strength of an underlying process is a monotonic function of explained variance. To infer the strength of underlying processes, one must instead compare explained variances to model-generated expectations. Our framework provides these expectations. We show that by combining the three types of ?-diversity with model-generated expectations our framework is able to provide rigorous inferences of the relative and absolute strengths of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering. Phylogenetic, functional and taxonomic ?-diversity can therefore be used simultaneously to infer processes by comparing their empirical patterns to the expectations generated by frameworks similar to the one developed here.

Dataset Information

The trinity of ecological contrasts: a case study on rich insect assemblages by means of species, functional and phylogenetic diversity measures.

Publications

The trinity of ecological contrasts: a case study on rich insect assemblages by means of species, functional and phylogenetic diversity measures.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets