Species Sorting of Benthic Invertebrates in a Salinity Gradient - Importance of Dispersal Limitation.

ABSTRACT: The relative importance of environment and dispersal related processes for community assembly has attracted great interest over recent decades, but few empirical studies from the marine/estuarine realm have examined the possible effects of these two types of factors in the same system. Importance of these processes was investigated in a hypothetical metacommunity of benthic invertebrates in 16 micro-tidal estuaries connected to the same open sea area. The estuaries differed in size and connectivity to the open sea and represented a salinity gradient across the estuaries. The Elements of Metacommunity Structure (EMS) approach on estuary scale was complemented with a mechanistic variance partitioning approach on sample scale to disentangle effects of factors affecting assembly of three trait

SUBMITTER: Josefson AB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5179068 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature