Divergent trophic responses to biogeographic and environmental gradients

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• 作者：Miguel G. Matias ; Cá ; tia Lú ; cio Pereira ; Pedro Miguel Raposeiro ; Ví ; tor Gon&ccedil ; alves ; Ana Mafalda Cruz ; Ana Cristina Costa and Miguel Bastos Araú ; jo
• 刊名：Oikos
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：126
• 期：i1
• 页码：101-110
• 全文大小：410K
• ISSN：1600-0706

文摘

Following environmental changes, communities disassemble and reassemble in seemingly unpredictable ways. Whether species respond to such changes individualistically or collectively (e.g. as functional groups) is still unclear. To address this question, we used an extensive new dataset for the lake communities in the Azores' archipelago to test whether: 1) individual species respond concordantly within trophic groups; 2) trophic groups respond concordantly to biogeographic and environmental gradients. Spatial concordance in individual species distributions within trophic groups was always greater than expected by chance. In contrast, trophic groups varied non-concordantly along biogeographic and environmental gradients revealing idiosyncratic responses to them. Whether communities respond individualistically to environmental gradients thus depends on the functional resolution of the data. Our study challenges the view that modelling environmental change effects on biodiversity always requires an individualist approach. Instead, it finds support for the longstanding idea that communities might be modelled as a cohort if the functional resolution is appropriate.