Dataset Information

Re-structuring of marine communities exposed to environmental change: a global study on the interactive effects of species and functional richness.

ABSTRACT: Species richness is the most commonly used but controversial biodiversity metric in studies on aspects of community stability such as structural composition or productivity. The apparent ambiguity of theoretical and experimental findings may in part be due to experimental shortcomings and/or heterogeneity of scales and methods in earlier studies. This has led to an urgent call for improved and more realistic experiments. In a series of experiments replicated at a global scale we translocated several hundred marine hard bottom communities to new environments simulating a rapid but moderate environmental change. Subsequently, we measured their rate of compositional change (re-structuring) which in the great majority of cases represented a compositional convergence towards local communities. Re-structuring is driven by mortality of community components (original species) and establishment of new species in the changed environmental context. The rate of this re-structuring was then related to various system properties. We show that availability of free substratum relates negatively while taxon richness relates positively to structural persistence (i.e., no or slow re-structuring). Thus, when faced with environmental change, taxon-rich communities retain their original composition longer than taxon-poor communities. The effect of taxon richness, however, interacts with another aspect of diversity, functional richness. Indeed, taxon richness relates positively to persistence in functionally depauperate communities, but not in functionally diverse communities. The interaction between taxonomic and functional diversity with regard to the behaviour of communities exposed to environmental stress may help understand some of the seemingly contrasting findings of past research.

SUBMITTER: Wahl M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3097188 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Re-structuring of marine communities exposed to environmental change: a global study on the interactive effects of species and functional richness.

Wahl Martin M Link Heike H Alexandridis Nicolaos N Thomason Jeremy C JC Cifuentes Mauricio M Costello Mark J MJ da Gama Bernardo A P BA Hillock Kristina K Hobday Alistair J AJ Kaufmann Manfred J MJ Keller Stefanie S Kraufvelin Patrik P Krüger Ina I Lauterbach Lars L Antunes Bruno L BL Molis Markus M Nakaoka Masahiro M Nyström Julia J bin Radzi Zulkamal Z Stockhausen Björn B Thiel Martin M Vance Thomas T Weseloh Annika A Whittle Mark M Wiesmann Lisa L Wunderer Laura L Yamakita Takehisa T Lenz Mark M

PloS one 20110518 5

Species richness is the most commonly used but controversial biodiversity metric in studies on aspects of community stability such as structural composition or productivity. The apparent ambiguity of theoretical and experimental findings may in part be due to experimental shortcomings and/or heterogeneity of scales and methods in earlier studies. This has led to an urgent call for improved and more realistic experiments. In a series of experiments replicated at a global scale we translocated sev ...[more]

PMID: 21611170

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Project description:Both habitat filters and spatial processes can influence community structure. Space alone affects species immigration from the regional species pool, whereas habitat filters affect species distribution and inter-specific interactions. This study aimed to understand how the interplay between environmental and geographical processes influenced the structure of Neotropical snake communities in different habitat types. We selected six studies that sampled snakes in forests, four conducted in savannas and two in grasslands (the latter two are grouped in a non-forest category). We used the net relatedness and nearest taxon indices to assess phylogenetic structure within forest and non-forest areas. We also used the phylogenetic fuzzy-weighting algorithm to characterize phylogenetic structure across communities and the relation of phylogenetic composition patterns to habitat type, structure, and latitude. Finally, we tested for morphological trait convergence and phylogenetic niche conservatism using four forest and four non-forest areas for which morphological data were available. Community phylogenetic composition changed across forest and non-forest areas suggesting that environmental filtering influences community structure. Species traits were affected by habitat type, indicating convergence at the metacommunity level. Tail length, robustness, and number of ventral scales maximized community convergence among forest and non-forest areas. The observed patterns suggested environmental filtering, indicating that less vertically structured habitats represent a strong filter. Despite the fact that phylogenetic structure was not detected individually for each community, we observed a trend towards communities composed by more closely related species in higher latitudes and more overdispersed compositions in lower latitudes. Such pattern suggests that the limited distribution of major snake lineages constrained species distributions. Structure indices for each community were also related to habitat type, showing that communities from non-forest areas tend to be more clustered. Our study showed that both environmental filtering and spatial gradients play important roles in shaping the composition of Neotropical snake communities.

Dataset Information

Re-structuring of marine communities exposed to environmental change: a global study on the interactive effects of species and functional richness.

Publications

Re-structuring of marine communities exposed to environmental change: a global study on the interactive effects of species and functional richness.

Similar Datasets

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