Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, 90089-2910, USA.
Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, 3535 Harbor Blvd., Suite 110, Costa Mesa, California, 92626, USA.
Ecol Appl. 2019 Jun;29(4):e01896. doi: 10.1002/eap.1896. Epub 2019 May 3.
Ecological monitoring of streams has frequently focused on measures describing the taxonomic, and sometimes functional, α diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates (BMIs) within a single sampled community. However, as many ecological processes effectively link BMI stream communities there is a need to describe groups of communities using measures of regional diversity. Here we demonstrate a role for incorporating both a traditional pairwise measure of community turnover, β diversity, in assessing community health as well as ζ diversity, a more generalized framework for describing similarity between multiple communities. Using 4,395 samples of BMI stream communities in California, we constructed a model using measures of α, β, and ζ diversity, which accounted for 71.7% of among-watershed variation in the mean health of communities, as described by the California Streams Condition Index (CSCI). We also investigated the use of ζ diversity in assessing models of stochastic vs. niche assembly across communities of BMIs within watersheds, with the niche assembly model found to be the likelier of the two.
溪流的生态监测通常侧重于描述单个采样群落中底栖大型无脊椎动物（BMI）的分类学，有时还有功能的 α 多样性。然而，由于许多生态过程有效地将 BMI 溪流群落联系在一起，因此需要使用区域多样性的度量来描述群落组。在这里，我们展示了一种将传统的群落周转率成对度量β多样性纳入评估群落健康状况的方法，以及ζ多样性，这是一种更通用的描述多个群落之间相似性的框架。我们使用加利福尼亚州的 4395 个 BMI 溪流群落样本，构建了一个使用α、β和ζ多样性度量的模型，该模型解释了 71.7%的流域间社区健康均值变化，如加利福尼亚溪流状况指数（CSCI）所描述的那样。我们还研究了ζ多样性在评估流域内 BMI 群落的随机与生态位组装模型中的应用，发现生态位组装模型更有可能。
