Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Exploring species and site contributions to beta diversity in stream insect assemblages

  • Community ecology – original research
  • Published:
Oecologia Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

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

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Brown JH (1984) On the relationship between abundance and distribution of species. Am Nat 124:255–279

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cribari-Neto F, Zeileis A (2010) Beta Regression in R. J Stat Softw 34:1–24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Dolédec S, Chessel D, Gimaret-Carpentier C (2000) Niche separation in community analysis: a new method. Ecology 81:2914–2927

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dray S, Dufour AB (2007) The ade4 package: implementing the duality diagram for ecologists. J Stat Softw 22:1–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gaston KJ (2003) The structure and dynamics of geographic ranges. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heino J (2013) Environmental heterogeneity, dispersal mode, and co-occurrence in stream macroinvertebrates. Ecol Evol 3:344–355

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Heino J, Muotka T, Paavola R (2003) Determinants of macroinvertebrate diversity in headwater streams: regional and local influences. J Anim Ecol 72:425–434

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heino J, Ilmonen J, Paasivirta L (2014) Continuous variation of macroinvertebrate communities along environmental gradients in northern streams. Boreal Env Res 19:21–38

    Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Google Scholar 

  • National Board of Waters and the Environment (1981) Vesihallinnon analyysimenetelmät. Publ Nat Board Wat Finland Report 213:1–136

    Google Scholar 

  • Nilsson A (ed) (1997) Aquatic insects of North Europe, vol 2. Apollo Books, Stenstrup

    Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Slatyer RA, Hirst M, Sexton JP (2013) Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Ecol Lett 16:1104–1114

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tachet H, Richoux P, Bournaud M, Usseglio-Polatera P (2010) Invertébrés d’eau douce: systématique, biologie, écologie (nouvelle édition revue et augmentée). CNRS, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Tales E, Keith P, Oberdorff T (2004) Density-range size relationships in French riverine fishes. Oecologia 138:360–370

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • 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

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

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

  1. Finnish Environment Institute, Natural Environment Centre, Biodiversity, Paavo Havaksen Tie 3, 90570, Oulu, Finland

    Jani Heino

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Section of Environmental Ecology, University of Helsinki, Niemenkatu 73, 15140, Lahti, Finland

    Mira Grönroos

Authors
  1. Jani Heino
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mira Grönroos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jani Heino.

Additional information

Communicated by Joel Trexler.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 133 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

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

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3754-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation