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31 results for “Species-area relationship.”
Climate-associated variation in the drivers of benthic macroinvertebrate species-area relationships across shallow freshwater lakes
<p><span>The island species-area relationship (ISAR) describes how species richness increases with increasing area of a given island or island-like habitat, such as freshwater lakes. </span><span>While the ISAR is one of the most common phenomena observed in ecology, there is variation in both the form of the relationship and its underlying mechanisms.</span></p> <p><span>We compiled a global dataset of benthic macroinvertebrates from 524 shallow freshwater lakes, ranging from 1 to 293300 ha in area. We used individual-based rarefaction to determine the degree to which ISAR was influenced by mechanisms other than passive sampling (larger islands passively sample more individuals from the regional pool and, therefore, have more species than smaller islands), which would bias results away from expected relationships between rarefied species richness (and other measures that capture relative abundances) and lake area. We also examined how climate may alter the shape of the ISARs. </span></p> <p><span>We found that both rarefied species richness (the number of species standardized by area or number of individuals) and a measure of evenness emphasizing common species exhibit non-significant relationships with lake area, suggesting that the expected ISARs in these lakes most likely result from passive sampling. </span><span>While there was considerable variation among ISARs across the investigated lakes, we found an overall positive rarefied ISAR for lakes in warm (i.e., tropical/subtropical) regions (n = 195), and in contrast, an overall negative rarefied ISAR in cool (i.e., north temperate) lakes (n = 329). This suggested that mechanisms beyond passive sampling (e.g., colonization-extinction dynamics and/or heterogeneity) were more likely to operate in warm lakes. One possible reason for this difference is that the area-dependent intensity of fish predation, which can lead to flatter ISARs, is weaker in warmer relative to cooler lakes.</span></p> <p><span>Our study illustrates the importance of understanding both the pattern and potential processes underlying the ISARs of freshwater lakes in different climatic regions. Further, it provides a baseline for understanding how further changes to the ecosystem (i.e., in lake area or climate) might influence biodiversity patterns. </span></p>
Data from: On the shape and origins of the freshwater species-area relationship
<p>The species-area relationship (SAR) has over a 150-year-long history in ecology, but how its shape and origins vary across scales and organisms is still not fully understood. This is the first subcontinental freshwater study to examine both properties of the SAR in a spatially explicit way across major organismal groups (diatoms, insects, and fish), differing in body size and dispersal capacity. First, to describe the SAR shape, we evaluated the fit of three commonly used models, logarithmic, power, and Michaelis-Menten. Second, we proposed a hierarchical framework to explain the variability in the SAR shape, captured by the parameters of the SAR model. According to this framework, scale and species group were the top predictors of the SAR shape, climatic factors (heterogeneity and median conditions) represented the second predictor level, and metacommunity properties (intraspecific spatial aggregation, γ-diversity, and species abundance distribution), the third predictor level. We calculated the SAR as a sample-based rarefaction curve using 60 streams within landscape windows (scales) in the US, ranging from 160,000 to 6,760,000 km<sup>2</sup>. First, we found that all models provided good fits (R<sup>2</sup> ≥ 0.93), but the frequency of the best-fitting model was strongly dependent on organism, scale, and metacommunity properties. Michaelis-Menten model was most common in fish, at the largest scales, and at the highest levels of intraspecific spatial aggregation. The power model was most frequent in diatoms and insects, at smaller scales, and in metacommunities with the lowest evenness. The logarithmic model was best fitting exclusively at the smallest scales and in species-poor metacommunities, primarily fish. Second, we tested our framework with the parameters of the most broadly used SAR model, the log-log form of the power model using a structural equation model. This model supported our framework and revealed that the SAR slope was best predicted by scale- and organism-dependent metacommunity properties, particularly spatial aggregation, while the intercept responded most strongly to species group and γ-diversity. Future research should investigate from the perspective of our framework how shifts in metacommunity properties due to climate change would alter the SAR.</p>
Data from: Optimizing passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for Biodiversity Studies: using species-area relationship (SAR) to predict species richness
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Data from: On the shape and origins of the freshwater species-area relationship
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Climate-associated variation in the drivers of benthic macroinvertebrate species-area relationships across shallow freshwater lakes
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Data from: Species-area relationships in the Andaman and Nicobar islands emerge because rarer species are disproportionately favored on larger islands
<p>The Island Species-Area relationship (ISAR) describes how the number of species increases with increasing size of an island (or island-like habitat), and is of fundamental importance in island biogeography and conservation. Here, we use a framework based on individual-based rarefaction to infer whether ISARs result from passive sampling, or whether some processes are acting beyond sampling (e.g., disproportionate effects and/or habitat heterogeneity). Using data on total and relative abundances of four taxa (birds, butterflies, amphibians and reptiles) from multiple islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, we examine how different metrics of biodiversity (total species richness, rarefied species richness, and abundance-weighted effective numbers of species emphasizing common species) vary with island area. Total species richness increased for all taxa, as did rarefied species richness controlling for a given sampling effort. This indicates that the ISAR did not result because of passive sampling, but that instead, some species were disproportionately favored on larger islands. For birds, frogs and lizards, this disproportionate effect was only associated with species that were rarer in the samples, but for butterflies, both more common and rarer species were affected. Furthermore, for the two taxa for which we had plot-level data (reptiles and amphibians), within-island β-diversity did not increase with island size, suggesting that within island compositional effects were unlikely to be driving these ISARs. Overall, our results indicate that the ISARs of these taxa are most likely driven by disproportionate effects, that is, where larger islands are important sources of biodiversity beyond a simple sampling expectation, especially through their influence on rarer species, thus emphasizing their role in the preservation and conservation of species.</p>
Data from: A Grinnellian niche perspective on species-area relationships
In this work, Grinnellian niche theory (a body of theory about geographic distributions of species in terms of non-interacting niche variables) is used to demonstrate that species-area relationships emerge with both size of environmental space and size of geographic area. As environmental space increases, more species' fundamental niches are included, thus increasing the number of species capable of living in the corresponding region. This idea is made operational by proposing a size measure for multidimensional environmental space and approximating fundamental niches with minimum-volume ellipsoids. This framework allows estimating a presence-absence matrix based on the distribution of fundamental niches in environmental space, from which many biodiversity measures can be calculated, such as beta diversity. I establish that Whittaker's equation for beta diversity is equivalent to MacArthur's formula relating species numbers and niche breadth; this latter equation provides a mechanism for the species niche-space relationship. I illustrate the theoretical results via exploration of niches of the terrestrial mammals of North America (north of Panama). Each world region has a unique structure of its environmental space, and the position of fundamental niches in niche space is different for different clades; therefore, species-area relationships depend on the clades involved and the region of focus, mostly as a function of MacArthur's niche beta diversity. Analyzing species-area relationships from the perspective of niche position in environmental space is novel, shifting emphasis from demographic processes to historical, geographic, and climatic factors; moreover, the Grinnellian approach is based on available data and is computationally feasible.
Data from: Sampling effects drive the species-area relationship in lake zooplankton
<p><b>The Island Species-Area relationship (ISAR) describes how the numbers of species increases with increasing size of an island (or island-like habitat, such as lakes), and is one of the oldest laws in ecology. Despite its conceptual importance, there remains a great deal of ambiguity regarding the ISAR and its underlying processes. We compiled data from sampled zooplankton assemblages from several hundred lakes in North America and Europe to examine the influence of the three main hypothesized mechanisms leading to ISARs - passive sampling, disproportionate effects, and habitat heterogeneity. We compiled data on lake zooplankton assemblages that reported sample-level and lake level species richness estimates, as well as relative abundance data. In both North American and European lakes, we found a consistent and strong increase in total species richness with increasing lake area. However, when we compared the number of species standardized by number of individuals, there was no relationship between lake area and sample-level species richness or an estimate of species relative abundances, calculated as the Probability of Interspecific Encounter (PIE; a measure of evenness). This was true even when multiple samples were taken across lakes and combined, reducing the likelihood that habitat heterogeneity was driving the results. Overall, our results suggest that the ISAR of zooplankton in these lakes was most likely determined by sampling effects rather than disproportionate effects or habitat heterogeneity leading to more species in larger lakes. Understanding the mechanisms driving ISAR results such as ours can also help us develop predictions for biodiversity change when the area of these habitats changes. </b></p>
Data for: Habitat diversity, resource availability, and island age in the species-area relationship
<p><strong>Aim: </strong>The island species-area relationship (ISAR) and its theoretical justifications assume the area of islands to be homogeneous across an archipelago, which is generally not the case. We compare the performance of models that adjust or substitute for island area with measures of habitat diversity, island age, and resource availability to account for the violation of this assumption. We further compare the performance of models for two taxonomic groups.</p> <p><strong>Location: </strong>Five hotspot archipelagos (Azores, Galapagos, Hawaii, Cape Verde, Canary Islands).</p> <p><strong>Taxa:</strong> Vascular plants and birds.</p> <p><strong>Methods: </strong>We used the mathematical framework of the power law to compare relevant models, treating the one containing only area as a null model against which others were compared. Data was collated from the GIFT database and from the literature. Models were compared using linear regression within archipelagos and via mixed effect models with archipelago as a random effect.</p> <p><strong>Results:</strong> Weighting of island area by habitat diversity and resource availability systematically improved statistical significance and model fits versus the area only power law. Models including island age did not show the same systematic improvement in model fits. For vascular plants, weighting islands by resource availability (energy and water) performed better than weighting by habitat diversity, although for birds these weightings performed equally well.</p> <p><strong>Main Conclusions:</strong> Given that islands within archipelagos are fairly uniform in climate, topography, and geology, it is worth accounting for this in ISARs. Our results suggest that, for islands in volcanic hotspot archipelagos this is best done by using direct measures of habitat diversity and resource availability rather than using island age as a proxy. Because weighting area by habitat diversity and resource availability produced better predictors of species diversity, the proposed approach may be particularly valuable in conservation science.</p>
Habitat quality drives the species-area relationship of plants and soil microbes in an ocean archipelago
<p>While the positive species-area relationship on islands is frequently observed, the mechanisms underlying this pattern remain poorly studied. By analyzing insular community diversity across spatial scales and the soil properties within the islands, we were able to explore potential mechanisms leading to the island species-area relationship of plants, as well as associated soil bacteria and fungi, from a tropical archipelago.<strong> </strong>We found that both plant and soil microbial communities showed similar positive species-area relationships across scales and the greater taxonomic diversity on larger islands was mainly driven by the higher richness within samples. These patterns arose primarily due to shifting habitat quality with island area, rather than spatial processes generally attributed to species-area relationships. Specifically, for plants, changes in soil total phosphorus content with island area were most explanatory, while changes in soil pH appeared to play the most important role in shaping soil bacteria and fungi patterns. By contrast, we found little evidence for the role of spatial processes (i.e., dispersal limitation or soil heterogeneity) within the island.<strong> </strong>Overall, this study highlights the importance of dissecting potential mechanisms underlying multi-trophic community dynamics to explain patterns of biodiversity and its variation on islands.</p>
Synthesis reveals that island species-area relationships emerge from processes beyond passive sampling
<p><strong>Aim</strong></p> <p>The Island Species-Area Relationship (ISAR) quantifies how the number of species increases as the area of an island or island-like habitat gets larger, and is one of ecology's most general patterns. However, studies that measure the ISAR often confound variation in sampling methodology and analyses, precluding appropriate syntheses of its underlying mechanisms. While most ISAR studies only use presence-absence data at the whole-island scale, we aggregated data sets of species-level abundances allowing for individual-based rarefaction.</p> <p><strong>Location</strong></p> <p>505 islands from 34 different archipelagos across the world, including oceanic islands, lake islands and forest islands.</p> <p><strong>Major Taxa Studied</strong></p> <p class="MsoPlainText">Local assemblages of plants, invertebrates, herpetofauna, birds, mammals</p>
Data from: Habitat heterogeneity overrides local processes to drive the species-area relationship of benthic macroinvertebrates in shallow floodplain lakes
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Data from: Species-area relationships in the Andaman and Nicobar islands emerge because rarer species are disproportionately favored on larger islands
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Data from: A Grinnellian niche perspective on species-area relationships
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Data from: Sampling effects drive the species-area relationship in lake zooplankton
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Data for: Habitat diversity, resource availability, and island age in the species-area relationship
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Extending species-area relationships into the realm of ecoacoustics: The soundscape-area relationship
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Synthesis reveals that island species-area relationships emerge from processes beyond passive sampling
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Habitat quality drives the species-area relationship of plants and soil microbes in an ocean archipelago
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Data from: Seed banks are biodiversity reservoirs: species-area relationships above versus below ground
Soil seed banks offer plants the possibility to disperse through time. This has implications for population and community dynamics, as recognised by ecological and evolutionary theory. In contrast, the conservation and restoration literature often find seed banks to be depauperate, weedy and without much conservation value or restoration potential. One explanation for these contrasting views might lie in a systematic bias in the sampling of seed banks versus established plant communities. We use the species–area relationship as a tool to assess and compare the per-area species richness and spatial structuring of the diversity of the established plant community versus soil seed banks. To allow this direct comparison we extensively survey the species–area relationship of the vegetation and underlying seed bank of a grassland community across twelve sites spanning regional bioclimatic gradients. We also compile a global dataset of established vegetation and seed banks from published sources. We find that seed banks have consistently higher intercepts and slopes of the relationship, and hence higher diversity at any given spatial scale, than the vegetation both in the field and literature study. This is consistent across habitat types, climate gradients, and biomes. Similarity indices are commonly used to compare vegetation and seed bank, and we find that sampling effort (% of the vegetation area sampled for seed bank) was the strongest predictor of vegetation–seed bank similarity for both the Sørensen (R2 = 0.70) and the Raup–Crick (R2 = 0.25) index. Our study suggests that the perception that seed banks are intrinsically less diverse than established plant communities has been based more on inadequate sampling than on biological reality. Across a range of ecosystems and climatic settings, we find high diversity in seed banks relative to the established community, suggesting potentially important roles of seed banks in population dynamics and diversity maintenance.
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