Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America.
Environment, Ecology and Energy Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Aug 7;19(8):e0297507. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297507. eCollection 2024.
We assessed the relative importance of environmental filtering and dispersal limitation in structuring foliage- and ground-dwelling arthropod communities in central North Carolina. We hypothesized that differences in both local environment and dispersal distance between sites would predict differences in community composition, but that dispersal distance would be more important for ground arthropods than for foliage arthropods. We used variance partitioning to quantify the relative explanatory power of differences in the local environment and dispersal distance between sampling plots. For foliage arthropods, the full set of predictors explained 37-39% of the variance in community dissimilarity, while the full set of predictors explained 42-56% of the variance for ground arthropods. Environmental predictors alone consistently explained more variance in community dissimilarity than geographic predictors alone for ground arthropods, but the variance explained by each predictor set alone varied for foliage arthropods depending on the metric of community dissimilarity. Examining communities of multiple arthropod groups across the same spatial gradient highlights the scale-dependence of these processes and illustrates how variation in the environment can alter the relative abundance of specialist and generalist taxa.
我们评估了环境过滤和扩散限制在构成北卡罗来纳州中部的叶面和地面节肢动物群落结构中的相对重要性。我们假设，局部环境和站点之间扩散距离的差异会预测群落组成的差异，但对于地面节肢动物来说，扩散距离比叶面节肢动物更重要。我们使用方差分解来量化局部环境和采样点之间扩散距离差异的相对解释能力。对于叶面节肢动物，预测因子的完整集合解释了群落相似性差异的 37-39%，而对于地面节肢动物，预测因子的完整集合解释了群落相似性差异的 42-56%。对于地面节肢动物，环境预测因子单独解释了更多的群落相似性差异，而地理预测因子单独解释了更多的群落相似性差异，但对于叶面节肢动物，每个预测因子集单独解释的方差取决于群落相似性的度量。检查同一空间梯度上多个节肢动物类群的群落，突出了这些过程的尺度依赖性，并说明了环境变化如何改变特化和广化类群的相对丰度。
