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Identifying the Drivers of Spatial Taxonomic and Functional Beta-Diversity of British Breeding Birds
- Source :
- Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 9 (2021), Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP), instacron:RCAAP
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Frontiers Media, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Spatial variation in community composition may be driven by a variety of processes, including environmental filtering and dispersal limitation. While work has been conducted on the relative importance of these processes on various taxa and at varying resolutions, tests using high-resolution empirical data across large spatial extents are sparse. Here, we use a dataset on the presence/absence of breeding bird species collected at the 10 km × 10 km scale across the whole of Britain. Pairwise spatial taxonomic and functional beta diversity, and the constituent components of each (turnover and nestedness/richness loss or gain), were calculated alongside two other measures of functional change (mean nearest taxon distance and mean pairwise distance). Predictor variables included climate and land use measures, as well as a measure of elevation, human influence, and habitat diversity. Generalized dissimilarity modeling was used to analyze the contribution of each predictor variable to variation in the different beta diversity metrics. Overall, we found that there was a moderate and unique proportion of the variance explained by geographical distance per se, which could highlight the role of dispersal limitation in community dissimilarity. Climate, land use, and human influence all also contributed to the observed patterns, but a large proportion of the explained variance in beta diversity was shared between these variables and geographical distance. However, both taxonomic nestedness and functional nestedness were uniquely predicted by a combination of land use, human influence, elevation, and climate variables, indicating a key role for environmental filtering. These findings may have important conservation implications in the face of a warming climate and future land use change.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
HOMOGENIZATION
beta-diversity
GDM
Climate
Beta diversity
lcsh:Evolution
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
PHYLOGENETIC COMMUNITY STRUCTURE
ENERGY
SPECIES-RICHNESS
0603 Evolutionary Biology
Geographical distance
lcsh:QH540-549.5
Avifauna
Community Composition
lcsh:QH359-425
avifauna
Spatial
Land use, land-use change and forestry
community composition
climate
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
LONG-TERM TRENDS
Science & Technology
CLIMATE-CHANGE
GLOBAL PATTERNS
Ecology
0602 Ecology
010604 marine biology & hydrobiology
Beta-diversity
Explained variation
spatial
Geography
EXTINCTION
Biological dispersal
Nestedness
Spatial variability
BIODIVERSITY
TURNOVER
Species richness
lcsh:Ecology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 9 (2021), Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP), instacron:RCAAP
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....e311c8df101c3c89495339839324b538