Elements of lake macrophyte metacommunity structure: Global variation and community‐environment relationships

García‐Girón, Jorge; Heino, Jani; Baastrup‐Spohr, Lars; Clayton, J. S.; Winton, Mary de; Feldmann, Tõnu; Fernández‐Aláez, Camino; Ecke, Frauke; Hoyer, Mark V.; Kolada, Agnieszka; Kosten, Sarian; Lukács, Balázs András; Mormul, Roger Paulo; Rhazi, Laïla; Rhazi, Mouhssine; Sass, Laura; Xu, Jun; Alahuhta, Janne

doi:10.1002/lno.11559

Cited by 18 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Based on a previous study on global variation in community similarity of lake plants (Alahuhta et al, 2017), we also expected (H2) that within–ecoregion and across–ecoregion heterogeneity would be caused by species replacements rather than by differences in species richness. Similarly, we predicted (H3) that climatic forcing would explain a great deal of variation in the robustness of freshwater plant ecoregions (Heino, 2011; Chappuis et al, 2012; Alahuhta et al, 2021, 2020; García–Girón et al, 2020a, 2020b), with topography, Pleistocene Ice Age legacies, human footprint, water alkalinity, availability of inland waterbodies and the surface area of individual regions playing an important supplementary role (Lacoul & Freedman, 2006; Chappuis et al, 2014; Iversen et al, 2019; Murphy et al, 2019, 2020). Finally, we hypothesised (H4) that ecoregions would be a more robust and useful classification for floating–leaved and submerged plants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Patterns and mechanisms underlying ecoregion delineation in North American freshwater plants

Alahuhta

García‐Girón

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Aim: Biogeographical regionalisations are actively studied in different ecosystems, because they increase our understanding on fundamental broad-scale patterns and can help us in the establishment of conservation areas. Thus, we studied how well existing freshwater ecoregions describe geographical delineation for inland water plants and which ecogeographical gradients explain them. Location: North America, excluding Mexico and remote islands. Taxon: Freshwater vascular plants of all taxa and different functional groups. Methods: Using newly available fine-grained data on freshwater plant distributions, we calculated internal homogeneity and cross-boundary heterogeneity among neighbouring ecoregions. We further integrated measures of community dissimilarity to assess whether the degree of within-ecoregion homogeneity and distinctness are driven by their relationships to species replacements and richness differences, and explored how a complex suite of ecogeographical mechanisms and plant life forms affect ecoregion delineation using spatially explicit regression routines. Results: We found a clear geographical patterning of ecoregion robustness for North American freshwater plants, with their communities being more internally homogeneous and more similar to one another in polar and subtropical inland waters. Surprisingly, the degree of internal homogeneity and ecoregion distinctness were almost equally driven by species replacements and richness differences. Considering different life forms, ecoregion delineation performed best for emergent and floating-leaved plants. Finally, within-ecoregion homogeneity and distinctness were best explained by annual mean temperature and terrain ruggedness, respectively, with mean water alkalinity, ecoregion area and Late Quaternary Ice Age legacies having supplementary effects. Main conclusions: Our findings emphasise that geographical regionalisations founded on a particular organismal group are not applicable for all taxa. Our study is a promising starting point for further investigations of geographical delineations for different freshwater taxa. These updated regionalisations can then be used for conserving different biotas in freshwaters, which are currently among the most threatened ecosystems in the world.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Patterns and mechanisms underlying ecoregion delineation in North American freshwater plants

Alahuhta

García‐Girón

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…2016; García‐Girón et al . 2020a). There was a relatively wide variation in the Z ‐scores of coherence, the Z ‐scores of range turnover, and the index of range boundary clumping among dinosaur clades and spatial scales (Table 2).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2010) and García‐Girón et al . (2020a). MI , Morisita's Index.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2019; García‐Girón et al . 2020a), it has never come to the fore in palaeontological analyses. The fossil record, however, offers a unique deep‐time perspective on metacommunity organization, allowing the resolution of functional, phylogenetic and life history settings that are not evident from only extant taxa but drove macroecological patterns during the Mesozoic (Codron et al .…”

Section: Concept Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: the Maastrichtian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

et al. 2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Documenting the patterns and potential associated processes of ancient biotas has always been a central challenge in palaeontology. Over recent decades, intense debate has focused on the organization of dinosaur-dominated communities, yet no general consensus has been reached on how these communities were organized in a spatial context. Here, we used analytical routines typically applied in metacommunity ecology to provide novel insights into dinosaurian distributions across the latest Cretaceous of North America. To do this, we combined fossil occurrences with functional, phylogenetic and palaeoenvironmental modelling, and adopted the perspective that more reasonable conclusions on palaeoecological reconstructions can be gained from studies that consider the organization of biotas along ecological gradients at multiple spatial scales. Our results showed that dinosaurs were restricted in range to different parts of the Hell Creek Formation, prompting the recognition of discrete and compartmentalized faunal areas during the Maastrichtian at fine-grained scales, whereas taxa with the broadest ranges included those with narrower distributions when combining data from various geological formations across the Western Interior of North America. Although groups of dinosaurs had coincident range boundaries, their communities responded to multiple ecologically-important gradients when compensating for differences in sampling effort. Metacommunity structures of both ornithischians and theropods were correlated with climatic barriers and potential trophic relationships between herbivores and carnivores, thereby suggesting that dinosaurian faunas were shaped by physiological constraints, limited food resources abundance, and a combination of bottom-up and top-down forces across multiple spatial grains and extents.

show abstract

“…Furthermore, the extent to which biotic disturbance (invasive species), anthropogenic disturbance (land use), and the abiotic environment (water quality) interact with each another and with space to drive patterns of species composition is not understood. Metacommunities of aquatic plants generally display a Clementsian pattern in many regions of the globe (García‐Girón et al., 2020), but how functional or phylogenetic groups of aquatic plants correspond to such structure is largely unknown, despite evidence that patterns of β diversity relate to taxonomic, functional, and phylogenic attributes of species (García‐Girón et al., 2019). Consequently, we evaluated patterns and processes in a metacommunity of native aquatic plants to comprehensively address three overarching goals: (1) determining the role of invasive aquatic plants in affecting the metacommunity; (2) unravelling the roles of space and three subcategories of local environmental disturbance (abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic) on species composition; and (3) assessing if functional or phylogenetic groups of native aquatic plants are associated with metacommunity structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unravelling the effects of multiple types of disturbance on an aquatic plant metacommunity in freshwater lakes

Lech

Willig

2021

Freshwater Biology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Lakes and ponds experience numerous forms of disturbance, including land use (anthropogenic), invasive species (biotic), and eutrophication (abiotic). Although these disturbances act independently or synergistically to affect native species composition, their effects generally are not considered simultaneously, thereby failing to account for appreciable variation or inaccurately attributing joint effects to a single type of disturbance. We assessed defining characteristics (coherence, turnover, and boundary clumping) of a metacommunity of 67 native aquatic macrophyte species that inhabit 104 lakes to determine the extent to which species respond to the same latent environmental gradient and the association of that gradient with multiple interrelated types of disturbance. Species generally responded to the same latent environmental gradient, with their distributions replacing one another along that gradient, resulting in a compartmentalised structure (i.e. Clementsian pattern). The latent environmental gradient was associated with disturbance; different functional or phylogenetic groups of species were associated with high or low levels of disturbance. We used variation partitioning to evaluate whether spatial or environmental attributes were more important in driving variation among lakes along the latent environmental gradient. We accounted for 78.7% of variation among lakes in species composition of native aquatic plants, with 10.0% due to unique attributes of space, 16.4% due to unique attributes of environment, and 52.2% due to spatially structured environmental attributes, highlighting the importance of species sorting. We separated environmental attributes into three subcategories: abiotic (water quality), biotic (invasive species), and anthropogenic (land use). We used variation partitioning on the three environmental subcategories and on spatial attributes to disentangle their independent and joint effects. We then used hierarchical partitioning to unravel the independent and joint effects of each attribute within each subcategory. Abiotic (water quality), biotic (invasive species), and anthropogenic (land use) disturbances each had significant total effects that are highly conflated with each other. Importantly, each subcategory of disturbance had significant unique effects on native aquatic plant composition. By using spatial characteristics as well as abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic attributes that are related to disturbance, we accounted for most of the variability in species composition among lakes. Of particular importance, invasive species independently, and interactively with other environmental characteristics, affected the metacommunity structure of native species. The emergent compartmentalised structure (Clementsian) of native species in the metacommunity arises because of species‐specific differences in response to a disturbance gradient, resulting in species with distinctive functional characteristics and phylogenetic histories at different ends of a disturbance gradient.

show abstract

Elements of lake macrophyte metacommunity structure: Global variation and community‐environment relationships

Cited by 18 publications

References 59 publications

Patterns and mechanisms underlying ecoregion delineation in North American freshwater plants

Patterns and mechanisms underlying ecoregion delineation in North American freshwater plants

Palaeontology meets metacommunity ecology: the Maastrichtian dinosaur fossil record of North America as a case study

Unravelling the effects of multiple types of disturbance on an aquatic plant metacommunity in freshwater lakes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About