Authors: Albert Ruhí Eglantine Chappuis Daniel Escoriza Miquel Jover Jordi Sala Dani Boix Stéphanie Gascón Esperança Gacia
Publish Date: 2013/04/25
Volume: 723, Issue: 1, Pages: 25-39
Abstract
Climate characteristics appear to play a key role in filtering organisms based on their biological traits If this trait filtering by climate indeed occurs it should have effects on the composition dynamics taxonomic relatedness and cooccurrence patterns of local assemblages regardless of the taxonomic group considered This preliminary study aimed to assess the extent to which environmental variables might determine these patterns in local communities and to evaluate whether the ultimate crosstaxon congruence relationships are consistent across or dependent on the selected region To this end we studied the bryophyte macrophyte macroinvertebrate and amphibian communities in two clusters of temporary wetlands on the NE Iberian Peninsula under mesothermal and semiarid climates We observed effects of environmental filtering with the communities differing between the climatic regions not only in their compositions but also in their dynamics and taxonomic relatedness patterns Although the crosstaxon congruence in terms of species richness was high in the mesothermal climate most of the congruent relationships were disrupted in the semiarid environment Overall because climatedependent patterns appear to prevail over climateconsistent ones we suggest that the use of surrogate taxa may be of limited value when aiming to assess wetland biodiversity across large areasThis study was supported by a Scientific Research grant CGL201123907 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Albert Ruhí held a FPU PhD grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation AP200600807 and Eglantine Chappuis was supported by an I3P fellowship from the Spanish National Research Council and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science We also wish to thank the Associate Editor Beat Oertli as well as two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments
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