Are all species necessary to reveal ecologically important patterns?

Ecology and Evolution

Edwin Pos⁴  Juan Ernesto Guevara Andino¹⁴  Daniel Sabatier⁹  Jean-François Molino⁹  Nigel Pitman¹¹  Hugo Mogollón³  David Neill¹²  Carlos Cerón¹³  Gonzalo Rivas¹⁶  Anthony Di Fiore¹  Raquel Thomas^4,5  Milton Tirado^2,4  Kenneth R. Young^4,17  Ophelia Wang^4,10  Rodrigo Sierra^2,4  Roosevelt García-Villacorta^4,8  Roderick Zagt^4,6  Walter Palacios^4,7  Milton Aulestia^4,15 

[1] Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, Texas;GeoIS, Quito, Ecuador;Endangered Species Coalition, Silver Spring, Maryland;Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands;Iwokrama International Programme for Rainforest Conservation, Georgetown, Guyana;Tropenbos International, Wageningen, the Netherlands;Universidad Técnica del Norte, Herbario Nacional del Euador, Quito, Ecuador;Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK;IRD, UMR AMAP, Montpellier, France;Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, 86011;The Field Museum, Illinois;Universidad Estatal Amazónica, Puyo, Ecuador;Universidad Central Herbario Alfredo Paredes, Escuela de Biología Herbario Alfredo Paredes, Quito, Ecuador;Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California;Herbario Nacional del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador;Wildlife Ecology and Conservation & Quantitative Spatial Ecology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida;Geography and the Environment, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

关键词: Beta‐diversity;    Fisher's alpha;    indets;    large‐scale ecological patterns;    Mantel test;    morpho‐species;    nonmetric multidimensional scaling;    similarity of species composition;    spatial turnover;   

DOI  :  10.1002/ece3.1246

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

While studying ecological patterns at large scales, ecologists are often unable to identify all collections, forcing them to either omit these unidentified records entirely, without knowing the effect of this, or pursue very costly and time-consuming efforts for identifying them. These “indets” may be of critical importance, but as yet, their impact on the reliability of ecological analyses is poorly known. We investigated the consequence of omitting the unidentified records and provide an explanation for the results. We used three large-scale independent datasets, (Guyana/ Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador) each consisting of records having been identified to a valid species name (identified morpho-species – IMS) and a number of unidentified records (unidentified morpho-species – UMS). A subset was created for each dataset containing only the IMS, which was compared with the complete dataset containing all morpho-species (AMS: = IMS + UMS) for the following analyses: species diversity (Fisher's alpha), similarity of species composition, Mantel test and ordination (NMDS). In addition, we also simulated an even larger number of unidentified records for all three datasets and analyzed the agreement between similarities again with these simulated datasets. For all analyses, results were extremely similar when using the complete datasets or the truncated subsets. IMS predicted ≥91% of the variation in AMS in all tests/analyses. Even when simulating a larger fraction of UMS, IMS predicted the results for AMS rather well. Using only IMS also out-performed using higher taxon data (genus-level identification) for similarity analyses. Finding a high congruence for all analyses when using IMS rather than AMS suggests that patterns of similarity and composition are very robust. In other words, having a large number of unidentified species in a dataset may not affect our conclusions as much as is often thought.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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