Abstract
Understanding the direct and indirect effects of niche and neutral processes in structuring species diversity is particularly challenging because environmental factors are often geographically structured. Here, we used Structural Equation Modeling to quantify direct and indirect effects of geographic distance, the Amazon River’s opposite margins, and environmental differences in temperature, precipitation, and vegetation density (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index—NDVI) on ant beta diversity (Jaccard’s dissimilarity) across Amazon basin. We used a comprehensive survey of ground-dwelling ant species from 126 plots distributed across eight sampling sites along a broad environmental gradient. We found that geographic distance and NDVI differences were the major direct predictors of ant composition dissimilarity. The major indirect effect was that of temperature through NDVI, whereas precipitation neither had direct or indirect detectable effects on beta diversity. Thus, ant compositional dissimilarity seems to be mainly driven by a combination of isolation by distance (through dispersal limitation) and selection imposed by vegetation density, and indirectly, by temperature. Our results suggest that neutral and niche processes have been similarly crucial in driving the current beta diversity patterns of Amazonian ground-dwelling ants.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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The custom code used in analysis during the current study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Daniel Ferreira for helping in the extraction of NDVI data. We also thank Bruna Mendel for constructive discussions about the measurement of geographic distance and Nikolas Cipola for helping in formatting some figures. D.R.G. was supported by CAPES scholarship doctoral—Finance code 001 and J.L.P.S. was supported by a CNPq PCI/INMA (302364/2020-0) post-doctoral scholarship. F.B.B. is continuously supported by CNPq grant (313986/2020-7).
Funding
This study was supported by the “Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisas do Estado do Amazonas (FAPEAM)” FIXAM/AM 062.01325/2014 and Universal Amazonas 62.00674/2015; “Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)” PNPD/03017/19-05 and PROEX n. 0742/2020; “Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)”, PRONEX 16/2006 and “Programa de Pesquisa em Biodiversidade (PPBio)” 558318/2009-6, 457545/2012-7.
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DRG, PACLP, FBB, and EF conceived the idea. FBB, JLPS, and CRSN collected the data. DRG, FBB and PACLP analyzed the data and DRG wrote the article with substantial collaboration from all the authors.
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Guilherme, D.R., Pequeno, P.A.C.L., Baccaro, F.B. et al. Direct and indirect effects of geographic and environmental factors on ant beta diversity across Amazon basin. Oecologia 198, 193–203 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05083-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05083-7