Department of Biology and Centers for Water and Wetlands Resources and Biodiversity and Conservation Research, The University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi, USA.
Ecology. 2022 Sep;103(9):e3766. doi: 10.1002/ecy.3766. Epub 2022 Jul 15.
Diversity in habitat patches is partly driven by variation in patch size, which affects extinction, and isolation, which affects immigration. Patch size also affects immigration as a component of patch quality. In wetland ecosystems, where variation in patch size and interpatch distance is ubiquitous, relationships between size and isolation may involve trade-offs. We assayed treefrog oviposition at three patch sizes in arrays of two types, one where size increased with distance from forest (dispersed) and one with all patches equidistant from forest (equidistant), testing directly for an interaction between patch size and distance, which was highly significant. Medium patches in dispersed arrays received more eggs than those in equidistant arrays as use of typically preferred larger patches was reduced in dispersed arrays. Our results demonstrated a habitat selection trade-off between preferred large and less-preferred medium patches across small-scale variation in isolation. Such patch size/isolation relationships are critical to community assembly and to understanding how diversity is maintained within a metapopulation and metacommunity framework, especially as wetland habitat becomes increasingly rare and fragmented. These results bring lessons of island biogeography, writ large, to bear on questions at small scales where ecologists often work and where habitat restoration is most often focused.
生境斑块的多样性部分是由斑块大小的变化驱动的，斑块大小会影响灭绝，而隔离则会影响移民。斑块大小也会作为斑块质量的一个组成部分影响移民。在湿地生态系统中，斑块大小和斑块间距离的变化普遍存在，大小和隔离之间的关系可能涉及权衡。我们在两种类型的排列中检测了三种斑块大小的树蛙产卵，一种是从森林向外距离增加的（分散的），另一种是所有斑块与森林的距离相等（等距的），直接测试了斑块大小和距离之间的相互作用，这一相互作用非常显著。在分散排列的中等大小斑块中，收到的卵比等距排列的多，因为在分散排列中，通常更喜欢的较大斑块的使用减少了。我们的研究结果表明，在隔离程度的小范围内，存在着对偏好较大和较不偏好的中等斑块的生境选择权衡。这种斑块大小/隔离关系对于群落组装以及理解多样性如何在一个集合种群和集合社区框架内得到维持至关重要，尤其是在湿地生境变得越来越稀少和破碎的情况下。这些结果将岛屿生物地理学的经验教训，应用于生态学家经常工作的小尺度问题上，也是生态恢复最常关注的问题。
