Geographical patterns and environmental drivers of functional diversity and trait space of amphibians of Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Mariana A. Tsianou ◽  
Athanasios S. Kallimanis
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Geographical Patterns ◽  
Trait Space

scholarly journals Do forest over- and understory respond to the same environmental variables when viewed at the taxonomic and trait level?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenny Helsen ◽  
Yeng-Chen Shen ◽  
Tsung-Yi Lin ◽  
Chien-Fan Chen ◽  
Chu-Mei Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Environmental Filtering ◽  
Soil Nutrient ◽  
Woody Species ◽  
Elevational Gradient ◽  
Functional Trait ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Diversity Patterns ◽  
Soil Variation

While the relative importance of climate filtering is known to be higher for woody species assemblages than herbaceous assemblage, it remains largely unexplored whether this pattern is also reflected between the woody overstory and herbaceous understory of forests. While climatic variation will be more buffered by the tree layer, the understory might also respond more to small-scale soil variation, next to experiencing additional environmental filtering due to the overstory's effects on light and litter quality. For (sub)tropical forests, the understory often contains a high proportion of fern and lycophyte species, for which environmental filtering is even less well understood. We explored the proportional importance of climate proxies and soil variation on the species, functional trait and (functional) diversity patterns of both the forest overstory and fern and lycophyte understory along an elevational gradient from 850 to 2100 m a.s.l. in northern Taiwan. We selected nine functional traits expected to respond to soil nutrient or climatic stress for this study and furthermore verified whether they were positively related across vegetation layers, as expected when driven by similar environmental drivers. We found that climate was a proportionally more important predictor than soil for the species composition of both vegetation layers and trait composition of the understory. The stronger than expected proportional effect of climate for the understory was likely due to fern and lycophytes' higher vulnerability to drought, while the high importance of soil for the overstory seemed driven by deciduous species. The environmental drivers affected different response traits in both vegetation layers, however, which together with additional overstory effects on understory traits, resulted in a strong disconnection of community-level trait values across layers. Interestingly, species and functional diversity patterns could be almost exclusively explained by climate effects for both vegetational layers, with the exception of understory species richness. This study illustrates that environmental filtering can differentially affect species, trait and diversity patterns and can be highly divergent for forest overstory and understory vegetation, and should consequently not be extrapolated across vegetation layers or between composition and diversity patterns.

scholarly journals The evolution of trait variance creates a tension between species diversity and functional diversity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Barabás ◽  
Christine Parent ◽  
Andrew Kraemer ◽  
Frederik Van de Perre ◽  
Frederik De Laender
Keyword(s):  
Species Diversity ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Functional Trait ◽  
Land Snail ◽  
Leaf Chemistry ◽  
Trait Variance ◽  
Trait Space

AbstractIt seems intuitive that species diversity promotes functional diversity. For example, more plant species imply more diverse leaf chemistry and thus more kinds of food for herbivores. Here we argue that the evolution of functional trait variance challenges this view. We show that trait-based eco-evolutionary processes force species to evolve narrower trait breadths in tightly packed communities, in their effort to avoid competition with neighboring species. This effect is so strong as to reduce overall trait space coverage, overhauling the expected positive relationship between species- and functional diversity. Empirical data from Galápagos land snail communities proved consistent with this claim. As a consequence, trait data from species-poor communities may misjudge functional diversity in species-rich ones, and vice versa.

Geographical Patterns of Functional Diversity of South American Anurans

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Tiago S. Vasconcelos ◽  
Fernando R. da Silva ◽  
Tiago G. dos Santos ◽  
Vitor H. M. Prado ◽  
Diogo B. Provete
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
South American ◽  
Geographical Patterns

scholarly journals Changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of plants in a chronosequence of Eucalyptus grandis plantations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela E. Pairo ◽  
Estela E. Rodriguez ◽  
M. Isabel Bellocq ◽  
Pablo G. Aceñolaza
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Leaf Litter ◽  
Plant Species ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Soil Ph ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Canopy Cover ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Natural Grasslands

AbstractTree plantations have become one of the fastest-growing land uses and their impact on biodiversity was evaluated mainly at the taxonomic level. The aim of this study was to analyze environmental changes after the Eucalyptus plantation in an area originally covered by natural grasslands, taking into account the alpha and beta (taxonomic and functional) diversity of plant communities. We selected nine plantation ages, along a 12 years chronosequence, with three replicates per age and three protected grasslands as the original situation. At each replicate, we established three plots to measure plant species cover, diversity and environmental variables. Results showed that species richness, and all diversity indices, significantly declined with increasing plantation age. Canopy cover, soil pH, and leaf litter were the environmental drivers that drove the decrease in taxonomic and functional diversity of plants through the forest chronosequence. Based on the path analyses results, canopy cover had an indirect effect on plant functional diversity, mediated by leaf litter depth, soil pH, and plant species richness. The high dispersal potential, annual, barochorous, and zoochorous plant species were the functional traits more affected by the eucalypt plantations. We recommend two management practices: reducing forest densities to allow higher light input to the understory and, due to the fact that leaf litter was negatively associated with all diversity facets, we recommend reducing their accumulation or generate heterogeneity in its distribution to enhance biodiversity.

scholarly journals Exotic species invasions undermine regional functional diversity of freshwater fish

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Milardi ◽  
Anna Gavioli ◽  
Janne Soininen ◽  
Giuseppe Castaldelli
Keyword(s):  
Exotic Species ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Taxonomic Diversity ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Ecological Traits ◽  
Species Invasions ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Fine Resolution

AbstractExotic species invasions often result in native biodiversity loss, i.e. a lower taxonomic diversity, but current knowledge on invasions effects underlined a potential increase of functional diversity. We thus explored the connections between functional diversity and exotic species invasions, while accounting for their environmental drivers, using a fine-resolution large dataset of Mediterranean stream fish communities. While functional diversity of native and exotic species responded similarly to most environmental constraints, we found significant differences in the effects of altitude and in the different ranking of constraints. These differences suggest that invasion dynamics could play a role in overriding some major environmental drivers. Our results also showed that a lower diversity of ecological traits in communities (about half of less disturbed communities) corresponded to a high invasion degree, and that the exotic component of communities had typically less diverse ecological traits than the native one, even when accounting for stream order and species richness. Overall, our results suggest that possible outcomes of severe exotic species invasions could include a reduced functional diversity of invaded communities, but analyzing data with finer ecological, temporal and spatial resolutions would be needed to pinpoint the causal relationship between invasions and functional diversity.

Environmental drivers of taxonomic and functional diversity of ant communities in a tropical mountain

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flávio Siqueira de Castro ◽  
Pedro Giovâni Da Silva ◽  
Ricardo Solar ◽  
Geraldo Wilson Fernandes ◽  
Frederico de Siqueira Neves
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Ant Communities ◽  
Tropical Mountain

Environmental drivers of fish functional diversity and composition in the Lower Colorado River Basin

2010 ◽  
Vol 67 (11) ◽  
pp. 1791-1807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Pool ◽  
Julian D. Olden ◽  
Joanna B. Whittier ◽  
Craig P. Paukert
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Native Species ◽  
Fish Community ◽  
Colorado River ◽  
Colorado River Basin ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Lower Colorado River Basin ◽  
Lower Colorado River

Freshwater conservation efforts require an understanding of how natural and anthropogenic factors shape the present-day biogeography of native and non-native species. This knowledge need is especially acute for imperiled native fishes in the highly modified Lower Colorado River Basin (LCRB), USA. In the present study we employed both a taxonomic and functional approach to explore how natural and human-related environmental drivers shape landscape-scale patterns of fish community composition in the LCRB. Our results showed that hydrologic alteration, watershed land use, and regional climate explained 30.3% and 44.7% of the total variation in fish community taxonomic and functional composition, respectively. Watersheds with greater dam densities and upstream storage capacity supported higher non-native functional diversity, suggesting that dams have provided additional “niche opportunities” for non-native equilibrium life-history strategists by introducing new reservoir habitat and modifying downstream flow and thermal regimes. By contrast, watersheds characterized by greater upstream land protection, lower dam densities, and higher variation in spring and summer precipitation supported fish communities with a strong complement of native species (opportunistic–periodic strategists). In conclusion, our study highlights the utility of a life-history approach to better understand the patterns and processes by which fish communities vary along environmental gradients.

scholarly journals Climate, topography and soil factors interact to drive community trait distributions in global drylands

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoann Le Bagousse-Pinguet ◽  
Pierre Liancourt ◽  
Nicolas Gross ◽  
Francesco de Bello ◽  
Carlos Roberto Carlos Fonseca ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Plant Communities ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Mean Annual Temperature ◽  
Sand Content ◽  
Change Models ◽  
Precipitation Seasonality ◽  
Global Patterns ◽  
The Impact

The skewness and kurtosis of community trait distributions (CTDs) can provide important insights on the mechanisms driving community assembly and species coexistence. However, they have not been considered yet when describing global patterns in CTDs. We aimed to do so by evaluating how environmental variables (mean annual temperature [MAT] and precipitation [MAP], precipitation seasonality [PS], slope angle and sand content) and their interactions affected the mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis of the plant CTDs in global drylands. We gathered specific leaf area and maximum plant height data from 130 dryland communities from all continents except Antarctica. Over 90% of the studied communities had skewed CTDs for SLA and height or had kurtosis values differing from those of normal distributions. Higher MAT and/or lower MAP led to a shift toward plant communities over-represented by “conservative” strategies, and a decrease in functional diversity. However, considering interactions among environmental drivers increased the explanatory power of our models by 20%. Sand content strongly altered the responses of height to changes in MAT and MAP (climate × topo-edaphic interactions). Increasing PS reversed the effects of MAT and MAP (climate × climate interactions) on the four moments of CTDs for SLA, particularly in dry-subhumid regions. Our results indicate that the increase in PS forecasted by climate change models will reduce the functional diversity of dry-subhumid communities. They also indicate that ignoring interactions among environmental drivers can lead to misleading conclusions when evaluating global patterns in CTDs, and thus may dramatically undermine our ability to predict the impact of global environmental change on plant communities and associated ecosystem functioning.

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