Hydrological stability drives both local and regional diversity patterns in rock pool metacommunities
By L. Brendonck, M. Jocqué, Karen Tuytens, B. Timms, Bram Vanschoenwinkel. 2015
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A main challenge associated with macro ecological gradients such as the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is that proxies of potential underlying processes are often correlated at large scales. One way to reliably identify contributing processes is to show that they can lead to similar responses at local scales. Using a set of invertebrate communities from rock pool clusters along a latitudinal gradient in Australia, we investigated the importance of hydrological stability for explaining both local and regional diversity patterns in this habitat. Results show that, at both local and regional scales, habitat stability in terms of the frequency and length of inundations was strongly correlated to local alpha diversity in individual pools and to gamma diversity at the level of pool clusters. Additionally, partitioning beta diversity into components of nestedness and species turnover revealed that communities in unstable habitats were nested subsets of communities in more stable habitats. Overall, this study provides convincing mechanistic support for the climate stability hypothesis as a potential explanation for the LDG in this system. Results also indicate that when there is enough time for dispersal and colonization, regional processes can be relatively unimportant compared to local processes to explain large scale diversity patterns.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Environmental Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1050e5a8edd27924ccf87847f28a69cba2806043
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecological Modeling
In Ecology
In Environmental Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Dormancy and dispersal as mediators of zooplankton population and community dynamics along a hydrological disturbance gradient in inland temporary pools (2017, background): “Using a set of invertebrate communities from rock pool clusters along a latitudinal gradient in Western Australia, Brendonck et al. (2015) investigated the importance of hydrological disturbance for explaining both local and regional diversity patterns and revealed that Hydrological stability was st”