Taxonomic and Functional Diversity of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Assemblages in Reservoirs of South Korea

Abstract

Numerous community indices have been developed to quantify the various aspects of communities. However, indices including functional aspects have been less focused on. Here, we examined how community composition varies in response to the environment and discovered the relationship between taxonomic diversity and functional diversity while considering the environment. Macroinvertebrate communities were collected from 20 reservoirs in South Korea. To characterize functional diversity, functional traits in four categories were considered: generation per year, adult lifespan, adult size, and functional feeding groups. Based on their community composition, we classified the reservoirs using hierarchical cluster analysis. Physicochemical and land use variables varied considerably between clusters. Non-metric multidimensional scaling indicated differences between reservoirs and clusters in terms of structure, functional diversity, and environmental variables. A self-organizing map was used to categorize functional traits, and network association analysis was used to unravel relationships between functional traits. Our results support the characteristics of species’ survival strategies such as r- and K-selection. Functional richness exhibited a relationship with taxonomic diversity. Our findings suggest that different types of diversity could play complementary roles in identifying biodiversity. Our findings should prove useful in developing new criteria for assessing freshwater ecosystem health, as well as in evaluating and predicting future alteration of benthic macroinvertebrate communities facing anthropogenic disturbances.

Functional trait dataset of benthic macroinvertebrates in South Korean streams

“…It is considered a currency of functional ecology to assess the functional properties of ecological communities 4 , 5 . It is used to measure functional diversity, which helps to understand how an ecosystem functions 6 .…”

Temporal variations of the multifaceted biodiversity and assembly mechanisms in lake fish assemblages

“…Functional diversity provides a measure of the niche diversity of species through specific taxonomic characteristics (Pavoine & Bonsall, 2011), although there is an evolutionary relationship between species' traits (Lee et al, 2023). Species with a similar genetic relationship often have similar functional traits; the similarity is decided by the phylogenetic signal strength of the functional traits (Burns & Strauss, 2011).…”

Impact of artificial barriers on benthic macroinvertebrate functional diversity in estuarine ecosystems

“…Aquatic ecologists emphasize the advantages of using functional traits, rather than taxonomy-based approaches, because functional traits offer valuable insights into organismal functions, ecological roles and responses to environmental stressors (Martini et al 2021). The FD of BMIs has been measured in freshwater (Bae & Park 2019;Lee et al 2022) and in estuarine ecosystems (Ferreira-Rodríguez et al 2022;Matela & Obolewski 2022). In the Republic of Korea, research on the FD of BMIs has been conducted in rivers and reservoirs but not in estuaries, and several studies have investigated BMI communities in intertidal zones, subtidal zones and tidal flats (Lim et al 1997;Ryu et al 2011;Kim & Koo 2016;Lee & Ryu 2018).…”

“…The FD of BMIs has been measured in freshwater (Bae & Park 2019; Lee et al . 2022) and in estuarine ecosystems (Ferreira‐Rodríguez et al . 2022; Matela & Obolewski 2022).…”