Comparing taxon- and trait-environment relationships in stream communities
Nenhuma Miniatura disponível
Data
2020-06
Título da Revista
ISSN da Revista
Título de Volume
Editor
Resumo
Traits define how organisms interact with their surrounding environment and with other organisms. Thus, trait
composition of biological communities is expected to change predictably along environmental gradients.
Because organisms’ traits, but not taxonomic identity, determine their fitness, trait-environment relationships
should provide a better way to elucidate how biodiversity respond to environmental change. Here, we used data
on tropical streams embedded in a landscape of intensive agriculture to investigate trait-environment and taxonenvironment
relationships in a set of 91 mayfly communities from southeastern Brazil. We expected that traitenvironment
relationships would be stronger than taxon-environment relationships and that the linkage between
traits and environmental variables would provide mechanistic insights on environmental filtering. We found that
variation in both species composition and traits were correlated to salinity, highlighting the influence of water
salinization on mayfly communities due to agricultural practices. Surprisingly, using analogous statistical
methods, in general, we found that the strengths of trait-environment relationships were lower than that of
taxon-environment relationships. Further, (1) species responses to gradients were not correlated to similarity in
their traits and (2) some species with different trait composition responded similarly to environmental variation,
indicating that different suite of traits can cope with similar environmental contexts. Besides some cautionary
results about trait-based approaches, results from taxon-based approaches indicated that variation in composition
was more related to spatial variables, suggesting that dispersal limitation undermine its use for large scale
assessments. Our results suggest that both taxon- and trait-based approaches have weakness and strengths and
deciding between them for biomonitoring purposes will depend on spatial scales, trait interrelationships, and
analytical methods.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Distance-based redundancy analysis, Trait-environment relationship, Community weighted mean, Tropical streams, Species trait Mayflies
Citação
SAITO, Victor Satoru; SIQUEIRA, Tadeu; BINI, Luis Mauricio; COSTA-PEREIRA, Raul; SANTOS, Edineusa Pereira; PAVOINE, Sandrine. Comparing taxon- and trait-environment relationships in stream communities. Ecological Indicators, Amsterdam, v. 117, p. 106625, June 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106625. Disponível em: https://www-sciencedirect.ez49.periodicos.capes.gov.br/journal/ecological-indicators/vol/117/suppl/C. Acesso em: 30 dez. 2022.