Untangling the relationships among regional occupancy, species traits, and niche characteristics in stream invertebrates

Ecology and Evolution

Jani Heino¹ 

[1] Finnish Environment Institute, Natural Environment Centre, Oulu, Finland

关键词: Body size;    invertebrates;    niche breadth;    niche position;    species traits;    streams;   

DOI  :  10.1002/ece3.1076

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

The regional occupancy and local abundance of species are affected by various species traits, but their relative effects are poorly understood. We studied the relationships between species traits and occupancy (i.e., proportion of sites occupied) or abundance (i.e., mean local abundance at occupied sites) of stream invertebrates using small-grained data (i.e., local stream sites) across a large spatial extent (i.e., three drainage basins). We found a significant, yet rather weak, linear relationship between occupancy and abundance. However, occupancy was strongly related to niche position (NP), but it showed a weaker relationship with niche breadth (NB). Abundance was at best weakly related to these explanatory niche-based variables. Biological traits, including feeding modes, habit traits, dispersal modes and body size classes, were generally less important in accounting for variation in occupancy and abundance. Our findings showed that the regional occupancy of stream invertebrate species is mostly related to niche characteristics, in particular, NP. However, the effects of NB on occupancy were affected by the measure itself. We conclude that niche characteristics determine the regional occupancy of species at relatively large spatial extents, suggesting that species distributions are determined by environmental variation among sites.

【 授权许可】

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

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.