Liu Shilong, Zhou Tianlong, Tan Xiaocai, Mtemi Wambura M, Jiang Aiwu
Guangxi Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Conservation, College of Forestry, Guangxi University, No. 100 East University Road, Xixiangtang District, Nanning 530004, China.
Curr Zool. 2023 Apr 20;70(2):204-213. doi: 10.1093/cz/zoad013. eCollection 2024 Apr.
Understanding the mechanisms of community assembly is a key question in ecology. Metal pollution may result in significant changes in bird community structure and diversity, with implications for ecosystem processes and function. However, the relative importance of these processes in shaping the bird community at the polluted area is still not clear. Here, we explored bird species richness, functional, and phylogenetic diversity, and the assembly processes of community at the mine region of southwest China. Our results showed that the 3 dimensions of diversity at the mine area were lower than that at the reference sites. In the community assembly, the result was 0 < NRI/ NFRI < 1.96, which indicated deterministic processes (environmental filtering) might drive community clustering. The results of the neutral community model, and normalized stochasticity ratio, showed the dominant role of stochastic processes in shaping the bird community assembly. We further quantified the community-level habitat niche breadth (), and we found that there was no difference in -value between the mine area and reference sites. This indicates that the bird communities at the mine area and 3 reference sites were not subjected to extreme environmental selection (same or different resource allocation) to form a highly specialized niche. These findings provide insights into the distribution patterns and dominant ecological processes of bird communities under metal exposure, and extend the knowledge in community assembly mechanisms of bird communities living in the mine area.
理解群落构建机制是生态学中的一个关键问题。金属污染可能导致鸟类群落结构和多样性发生显著变化，进而影响生态系统过程和功能。然而，这些过程在塑造污染区域鸟类群落方面的相对重要性仍不明确。在此，我们探究了中国西南部矿区鸟类的物种丰富度、功能多样性和系统发育多样性，以及群落的构建过程。我们的结果表明，矿区的三个多样性维度均低于参考地点。在群落构建方面，结果为0 < NRI / NFRI < 1.96，这表明确定性过程（环境过滤）可能驱动群落聚集。中性群落模型和标准化随机性比率的结果表明，随机过程在塑造鸟类群落构建中起主导作用。我们进一步量化了群落水平的栖息地生态位宽度（），发现矿区与参考地点之间的 - 值没有差异。这表明矿区和三个参考地点的鸟类群落没有受到极端环境选择（相同或不同的资源分配）以形成高度专业化的生态位。这些发现为金属暴露下鸟类群落的分布模式和主要生态过程提供了见解，并扩展了对矿区鸟类群落构建机制的认识。
