Clarke K R, Warwick R M
Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Prospect Place, West Hoe, Plymouth, PL1 3DH, UK Fax: +44 1752 633101, , , , , , GB.
Oecologia. 1998 Jan;113(2):278-289. doi: 10.1007/s004420050379.
In multivariate analyses of the effects of both natural and anthropogenic environmental variability on community composition, many species are interchangeable in the way that they characterise the samples, giving rise to the concept of structural redundancy in community composition. Here, we develop a method of quantifying the extent of this redundancy by extracting a series of subsets of species, the multivariate response pattern of each of which closely matches that for the whole community. Structural redundancy is then reflected in the number of such subsets, which we term "response units", that can be extracted without replacement. We have applied this technique to the effects of the Amoco-Cadiz oil-spill on marine macrobenthos in the Bay of Morlaix, France, and to the natural interannual variability of macrobenthos at two stations off the coast of Northumberland, England. Structural redundancy is shown to be remarkably high, with the number and sizes of subsets being comparable in all three examples. Taxonomic/functional groupings of species within the differing response units change in abundance in the same way over time. The response units are shown to possess a wide taxonomic spread and, using two different types of randomisation test, demonstrated to have a taxonomically and functionally coherent structure. The level of structural redundancy may therefore be an indirect measure of the resilience or compensation potential within an assemblage.
在对自然和人为环境变化对群落组成影响的多变量分析中，许多物种在表征样本的方式上是可互换的，这就产生了群落组成中结构冗余的概念。在此，我们开发了一种量化这种冗余程度的方法，即提取一系列物种子集，其中每个子集的多变量响应模式与整个群落的模式紧密匹配。结构冗余随后体现在无需替换即可提取的此类子集（我们称之为“响应单元”）的数量上。我们已将此技术应用于阿莫科 - 卡迪兹号油轮泄漏对法国莫尔莱湾海洋大型底栖生物的影响，以及英国诺森伯兰海岸外两个站点大型底栖生物的自然年际变化。结果表明结构冗余非常高，在所有三个例子中，子集的数量和大小都具有可比性。不同响应单元内物种的分类学/功能分组随时间以相同方式在丰度上发生变化。结果表明响应单元具有广泛的分类学分布，并通过两种不同类型的随机化检验证明具有分类学和功能上连贯的结构。因此，结构冗余水平可能是一个组合体内恢复力或补偿潜力的间接度量。
