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46 results for “beta-diversity”

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dryad32/100

Data from: Disturbance alters beta-diversity but not the relative importance of community assembly mechanisms

1.Ecological disturbances are often hypothesized to alter community assembly processes that influence variation in community composition (β-diversity). Disturbance can cause convergence in community composition (low β-diversity) by increasing niche selection of disturbance-tolerant species. Alternatively, disturbance can cause divergence in community composition (high β-diversity) by increasing habitat filtering across environmental gradients. However, because disturbance may also influence β-diversity through random sampling effects owing to changes in the number of individuals in local communities (community size) or abundances in the regional species pool, observed patterns of β-diversity alone cannot be used to unambiguously discern the relative importance of community assembly mechanisms. 2.We compared β-diversity of woody plants and inferred assembly mechanisms among unburned forests and forests managed with prescribed fires in the Missouri Ozarks, USA. Using a null-model approach, we compared how environmental gradients influenced β-diversity after controlling for differences in local community size and regional species abundances between unburned and burned landscapes. 3.Observed β-diversity was higher in burned landscapes. However, this pattern disappeared or reversed after controlling for smaller community size in burned landscapes. 4.β-diversity was higher than expected by chance in both landscapes, indicating an important role for processes that create clumped species distributions. Moreover, fire appeared to decrease clumping of species at broader spatial scales, suggesting homogenization of community composition through niche selection of disturbance-tolerant species. Environmental variables, however, explained similar amounts of variation in β-diversity in both landscapes, suggesting that disturbance did not alter the relative importance of habitat filtering. 5.Our results indicate that contingent responses of communities to fire reflect a combination of fire-induced changes in local community size and scale-dependent effects of fire on species clumping across landscapes. 6.Synthesis. Although niche-based mechanisms of community assembly are often invoked to explain changes in community composition following disturbance, our results suggest that these changes also arise through random sampling effects owing to the influence of disturbance on community size. Comparative studies of these processes across disturbed ecosystems will provide important insights into the ecological conditions that determine when disturbance alters the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in natural and human-modified landscapes.

opencc-zeroDec 2014View details →

dryad32/100

Data from: Environmental constraints on the compositional and phylogenetic beta-diversity of tropical forest snake assemblages

The ongoing biodiversity crisis increases the importance and urgency of studies addressing the role of environmental variation on the composition and evolutionary history of species assemblages, but especially the tropics and ectotherms remain understudied. In regions with rainy summers, coexistence of ectothermic species may be determined by the partitioning of the climatic niche, since ectotherms can rely on water availability and thermoregulatory behaviour to buffer constraints along their climatic niche. Conversely, ectotherms facing dry summers would have fewer opportunities to climatic niche partitioning and other processes rather than environmental filtering would mediate species coexistence. We used 218 snake assemblages to quantify the compositional (CBD) and phylogenetic (PBD) beta-diversity of snakes in the Atlantic Forest (AF) hotspot. We identify two AF regions with distinct climatological regimes: dry summers in the northern-AF and rainy summers in the southern-AF. While accounting for the influence of multiscale spatial processes, we disentangle the relative contribution of thermal, water-related, and topographic conditions in structuring the CBD and PBD of snake assemblages, and determine the extent in which snake assemblages under distinct climatological regimes are affected by environmental filtering. Thermal conditions best explain CBD and PBD of snakes for the whole AF, whereas water-related factors best explain the structure of snake assemblages within a same climatological regime. CBD and PBD patterns are similarly explained by spatial factors but snake assemblages facing dry summers are more affected by spatial processes operating at fine to intermediate spatial scale whereas those assemblages in regions with rainy summers have a stronger signature of coarser-scale processes. As expected, environmental filtering plays a stronger role in southern-AF than northern-AF, and the synergism between thermal and water-related conditions is the key cause behind this difference. Differences in climatological regimes within the tropics may affect processes mediating species coexistence. The role of broad-scale gradients (e.g. temperature, precipitation) in structuring tropical ectothermic assemblages is greater in regions with rainy summers where climatic niche partitioning is more likely. Our findings highlight the potential stronger role of biotic interactions and neutral processes in structuring ectothermic assemblages facing changes towards warmer and dryer climates.

opencc-zeroDec 2016View details →

dryad32/100

Data from: When does intraspecific trait variation contribute to functional beta-diversity?

1. Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) is hypothesized to play an important role in community assembly and the maintenance of biodiversity. However, fundamental gaps remain in our understanding of how ITV contributes to mechanisms that create spatial variation in the functional-trait composition of communities (functional β-diversity). Importantly, ITV may influence the perceived importance of environmental filtering across spatial scales. 2. We examined how ITV contributes to functional β-diversity and environmental filtering in woody plant communities in a temperate forest in the Ozark ecoregion, Missouri, USA. To test the hypothesis that ITV contributes to changes in the perceived importance of environmental filtering across scales, we compared patterns of functional β-diversity across soil-resource and topographic gradients at three spatial grains and three spatial extents. To quantify the contribution of ITV to functional β-diversity, we compared patterns that included ITV in five traits (leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf water content, leaf toughness, and chlorophyll content) to patterns based on species-mean trait values. 3. Functional β-diversity that included ITV increased with spatial extent and decreased with spatial grain, suggesting stronger environmental filtering within spatially extensive landscapes that contain populations locally adapted to different habitats. In contrast, functional β-diversity based on species-mean trait values increased with spatial extent but did not change with spatial grain, suggesting weaker environmental filtering among larger communities which each contain a variety of habitats and locally adapted populations. 4. Synthesis. Although studies typically infer community assembly mechanisms from species-mean trait values, our study suggests that mean trait values may mask the strength of assembly mechanisms such as environmental filtering, especially in landscape-scale studies that encompass strong environmental gradients and locally adapted populations. Our study highlights the utility of integrating ITV into studies of functional β-diversity to better understand the ecological conditions under which trait variation within and among species contributes most strongly to patterns of biodiversity across spatial scales.

opencc-zeroDec 2014View details →

zenodo32/100

Supplementary material 3 from: Li Y, Evans NT, Renshaw MA, Jerde CL, Olds BP, Shogren AJ, Deiner K, Lodge DM, Lamberti GA, Pfrender ME (2018) Estimating fish alpha- and beta-diversity along a small stream with environmental DNA metabarcoding. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 2: e24262. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.2.24262

The longitudinal distance (upper triangular) and β- diversity (lower triangular) between sampling locations along Eagle Creek. :

opencc-zeroMay 2018View details →

zenodo32/100

Supplementary material 4 from: Li Y, Evans NT, Renshaw MA, Jerde CL, Olds BP, Shogren AJ, Deiner K, Lodge DM, Lamberti GA, Pfrender ME (2018) Estimating fish alpha- and beta-diversity along a small stream with environmental DNA metabarcoding. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 2: e24262. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.2.24262

Mantel r and p-values for all the pairwise comparisons between single marker, three markers and longitudinal distance. :

opencc-zeroMay 2018View details →

zenodo32/100

Supplementary material 5 from: Li Y, Evans NT, Renshaw MA, Jerde CL, Olds BP, Shogren AJ, Deiner K, Lodge DM, Lamberti GA, Pfrender ME (2018) Estimating fish alpha- and beta-diversity along a small stream with environmental DNA metabarcoding. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 2: e24262. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.2.24262

The correlation between environmental variables and β-diversity and longitudinal distance using Mantel test :

opencc-zeroMay 2018View details →

dryad32/100

Alpha-diversity, Beta-diversity and host-specificity of wood-boring longhorn beetle (Cerambycidea) in Asian tropical and subtropical forests

A long-debated question in ecology is whether the hyper-diversity of tropical plant-feeding insects is a direct consequence of high tropical plant diversity and/or should be attributed to increases in host plant specialization. To address this debate, we used the longhorn beetle as a study system because their larval stages feed on the xylems of trees and lianas. We hypothesized that longhorn beetles show higher host-specificity in tropical forests than in other forests; alternatively, the high longhorn beetle diversity in the tropics may simply be owing to more diverse host plants. We therefore designed an investigation in tropical and subtropical forests to test these hypotheses. We adapted several analyses (i.e., non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis, alpha-diversity, beta-dissimilarity indices comparisons, and variation partitioning based on redundancy analysis) to compare the species diversity of plants and longhorn beetles in different forests. Our results show that both the plant and beetle species in the tropical and subtropical areas were well-stratified (non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis). The beetle alpha-diversity in the tropical forests was significantly higher than that in the subtropical forests, but the plant alpha-diversity in the two types of forests were not significantly different. The beta-dissimilarity comparison showed that the plant species exerted a significant influence on beetle compositional assemblage in the tropical forests, but not in the subtropical forests. Finally, the variation partitioning results showed that both plant species and plant phylogenetic beta-diversity possessed significant explanatory power for beetle assemblage composition in the tropical forests, but not in the subtropical forests. We conclude that wood-boring longhorn beetles show higher host-specificity in tropical forests than in subtropical forests, and the high diversity of wood-boring longhorn beetles in tropical forests might be explained to a large extent by their more finely partitioned diet-breadth.

opencc-zeroAug 2021View details →

dryad32/100