de Fraga Rafael, Ferrão Miquéias, Stow Adam J, Magnusson William E, Lima Albertina P
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil.
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
PeerJ. 2018 Sep 24;6:e5628. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5628. eCollection 2018.
Mechanisms generating and maintaining biodiversity at regional scales may be evaluated by quantifying β-diversity along environmental gradients. Differences in assemblages result in biotic complementarities and redundancies among sites, which may be quantified through multi-dimensional approaches incorporating taxonomic β-diversity (TBD), functional β-diversity (FBD) and phylogenetic β-diversity (PBD). Here we test the hypothesis that snake TBD, FBD and PBD are influenced by environmental gradients, independently of geographic distance. The gradients tested are expected to affect snake assemblages indirectly, such as clay content in the soil determining primary production and height above the nearest drainage determining prey availability, or directly, such as percentage of tree cover determining availability of resting and nesting sites, and climate (temperature and precipitation) causing physiological filtering. We sampled snakes in 21 sampling plots, each covering five km, distributed over 880 km in the central-southern Amazon Basin. We used dissimilarities between sampling sites to quantify TBD, FBD and PBD, which were response variables in multiple-linear-regression and redundancy analysis models. We show that patterns of snake community composition based on TBD, FBD and PBD are associated with environmental heterogeneity in the Amazon. Despite positive correlations between all β-diversity measures, TBD responded to different environmental gradients compared to FBD and PBD. Our findings suggest that multi-dimensional approaches are more informative for ecological studies and conservation actions compared to a single diversity measure.
通过沿环境梯度量化β多样性,可以评估区域尺度上生物多样性的产生和维持机制。群落差异导致各地点间的生物互补性和冗余性,这可以通过纳入分类β多样性(TBD)、功能β多样性(FBD)和系统发育β多样性(PBD)的多维度方法进行量化。在此,我们检验一个假设,即蛇类的TBD、FBD和PBD受环境梯度影响,与地理距离无关。所测试的梯度预计会间接影响蛇类群落,例如土壤中的粘土含量决定初级生产力,离最近排水点的高度决定猎物可获得性;或者直接影响,例如树木覆盖率决定休息和筑巢地点的可获得性,以及气候(温度和降水)导致生理筛选。我们在21个采样地块中对蛇类进行采样,每个地块覆盖5公里,分布在亚马逊盆地中南部880公里的区域。我们利用采样地点之间的差异来量化TBD、FBD和PBD,它们是多元线性回归和冗余分析模型中的响应变量。我们表明,基于TBD、FBD和PBD的蛇类群落组成模式与亚马逊地区的环境异质性相关。尽管所有β多样性测度之间存在正相关,但与FBD和PBD相比,TBD对不同的环境梯度有响应。我们的研究结果表明,与单一多样性测度相比,多维度方法在生态研究和保护行动中提供的信息更多。