Abstract
It was recently suggested that beta diversity can be partitioned into contributions of single sites to overall beta diversity (LCBD) or into contributions of individual species to overall beta diversity (SCBD). We explored the relationships of LCBD and SCBD to site and species characteristics, respectively, in stream insect assemblages. We found that LCBD was mostly explained by variation in species richness, with a negative relationship being detected. SCBD was strongly related to various species characteristics, such as occupancy, abundance, niche position and niche breadth, but was only weakly related to biological traits of species. In particular, occupancy and its quadratic terms showed a very strong unimodal relationship with SCBD, suggesting that intermediate species in terms of site occupancy contribute most to beta diversity. Our findings of unravelling the contributions of sites or species to overall beta diversity are of high importance to community ecology, conservation and bioassessment using stream insect assemblages, and may bear some overall generalities to be found in other organism groups.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson MJ, Crist TO, Chase JM, Vellend M, Inouye BD, Freestone AL, Sanders NJ, Cornell HV, Comita LS, Davies KF, Harrison SP, Kraft NJB, Stegen JC, Swenson GS (2011) Navigating the multiple meanings of β diversity: a roadmap for the ecologist. Ecol Lett 14:19–28
Brown JH (1984) On the relationship between abundance and distribution of species. Am Nat 124:255–279
Cribari-Neto F, Zeileis A (2010) Beta Regression in R. J Stat Softw 34:1–24
da Silva PG, Hernández MIM (2014) Local and regional effects on community structure of dung beetles in a mainland-island scenario. PLoS One 9:e111883
Dolédec S, Chessel D, Gimaret-Carpentier C (2000) Niche separation in community analysis: a new method. Ecology 81:2914–2927
Dray S, Dufour AB (2007) The ade4 package: implementing the duality diagram for ecologists. J Stat Softw 22:1–20
Gaston KJ (2003) The structure and dynamics of geographic ranges. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Gaston KJ, Borges PAV, He F, Gaspar C (2006) Abundance, spatial variance and occupancy: arthropod species distribution in the Azores. J Anim Ecol 75:646–656
Giraudoux P (2016) Pgirmess: data analysis in ecology. R package version 1.6.4. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pgirmess. Accessed 1 June 2016
Grönroos M, Heino J (2012) Species richness at the guild level: effects of species pool and local environmental conditions on stream macroinvertebrate communities. J Anim Ecol 81:679–691
Grönroos M, Heino J, Siqueira T, Landeiro VL, Kotanen J, Bini LM (2013) Metacommunity structuring in stream networks: roles of dispersal mode, distance type and regional environmental context. Ecol Evol 3:4473–4487
Hawkins CP, Mykrä H, Oksanen J, Vander Laan JJ (2015) Environmental disturbance can increase beta diversity of stream macroinvertebrate assemblages. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 24:483–494
Heino J (2005) Positive relationship between regional distribution and local abundance in stream insects: a consequence of niche breadth or habitat niche position? Ecography 28:345–354
Heino J (2013) Environmental heterogeneity, dispersal mode, and co-occurrence in stream macroinvertebrates. Ecol Evol 3:344–355
Heino J (2015) Deconstructing occupancy frequency distributions in stream insects: effects of body size and niche characteristics in different geographical regions. Ecol Entomol 40:491–499
Heino J, de Mendoza G (2016) Predictability of stream insect distributions is dependent on niche position, but not on biological traits or taxonomic relatedness of species. Ecography (in press)
Heino J, Grönroos M (2014) Untangling the relationships among regional occupancy, species traits and niche characteristics in stream invertebrates. Ecol Evol 4:1931–1942
Heino J, Muotka T, Paavola R (2003) Determinants of macroinvertebrate diversity in headwater streams: regional and local influences. J Anim Ecol 72:425–434
Heino J, Ilmonen J, Paasivirta L (2014) Continuous variation of macroinvertebrate communities along environmental gradients in northern streams. Boreal Env Res 19:21–38
Laliberté E, Legendre P, Shipley B (2014) FD: measuring functional diversity from multiple traits, and other tools for functional ecology. R package version 1.0–12. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FD/index.html. Accessed 1 June 2016
Legendre P, De Cáceres M (2013) Beta diversity as the variance of community data: dissimilarity coefficients and partitioning. Ecol Lett 16:951–963
Lopes PM, Bini LM, Declerck SAJ, Farjalla VF, Vieira LCG, Bonecker CC, Lansac-Toha FA, Esteves FA, Bozelli RL (2014) Correlates of zooplankton beta diversity in tropical lake systems. PLoS One 9:e109581
Mayor SJ, Boutin S, He F, Cahill JF Jr (2015) Limited impacts of extensive human land use on dominance, specialization, and biotic homogenization in boreal plant communities. BMC Ecol 15:5
Merritt RW, Cummins KW (1996) An introduction to the aquatic insects of North America, third edition. Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, USA
Moog O (2002) Fauna Aquatica Austriaca. Katalog zur autoökologischen Einstufung aquatischer Organismen Österreichs. -Bundesministerium für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, Umwelt und Wasserwirtschaft, Wien
Mykrä H, Ruokonen T, Muotka T (2006) The effect of sample duration on the efficiency of kick-sampling in two streams with contrasting substratum heterogeneity. Ver Int Ver Theor Ang Limnol 29:1351–1355
National Board of Waters and the Environment (1981) Vesihallinnon analyysimenetelmät. Publ Nat Board Wat Finland Report 213:1–136
Nilsson A (ed) (1997) Aquatic insects of North Europe, vol 2. Apollo Books, Stenstrup
Poff NL, Olden JD, Vieira NKM, Finn DS, Simmons MP, Kondratieff BC (2006) Functional trait niches of North American lotic insects: traits-based ecological applications in light of phylogenetic relationships. J N Amer Bentholl Soc 25:730–755
R Core Team (2015) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/. Accessed 1 June 2016
Siegel S, Castellan NJ (1988) Nonparametric statistics for the behavioural sciences. MacGraw Hill International, New York
Siqueira T, Bini LM, Cianciaruso MV, Roque FO, Trivinho-Strixino S (2009) The role of niche measures in explaining the abundance–distribution relationship in tropical lotic chironomids. Hydrobiologia 636:163–172
Slatyer RA, Hirst M, Sexton JP (2013) Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Ecol Lett 16:1104–1114
Tachet H, Richoux P, Bournaud M, Usseglio-Polatera P (2010) Invertébrés d’eau douce: systématique, biologie, écologie (nouvelle édition revue et augmentée). CNRS, Paris
Tales E, Keith P, Oberdorff T (2004) Density-range size relationships in French riverine fishes. Oecologia 138:360–370
Tonkin JD, Heino J, Sundermann A, Haase P, Jähnig S (2016) Context dependency in biodiversity patterns of central German stream metacommunities. Freshw Biol 61:607–620
US EPA (2012) Freshwater biological traits database (Final Report) US. Environmental protection agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-11/038F, 2012
Verberk WCEP, van der Velde G, Esselink H (2010) Explaining abundance-occupancy relationships in specialists and generalists: a case study on aquatic macroinvertebrates in standing waters. J Anim Ecol 79:589–601
Vieira NKM, Poff N, Carlisle DM, Moulton SR, Koski ML, Kondratieff BC (2006) A database of lotic invertebrate traits for North America: US geological survey data series 18
Whittaker RH (1960) Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California. Ecol Monogr 30:279–338
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the Academy of Finland, Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation, and Kone Foundation. We thank Sylvain Dolédec, Jari Ilmonen and Lauri Paasivirta for insect body size information, and Tommi Karhu, Maija Niva and Heikki Mykrä for help with the field and laboratory work. We also thank Jamie Kneitel and two anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Author contribution statement
JH devised the study idea, ran the analyses and led the writing. MG collected trait data, commented on all phases of the study and contributed to the writing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Communicated by Joel Trexler.
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Heino, J., Grönroos, M. Exploring species and site contributions to beta diversity in stream insect assemblages. Oecologia 183, 151–160 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3754-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3754-7