Experimental evaluation of biodiversity response to dispersal barriers and patch primary producer biomass in Mediterrane
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Aquatic Sciences
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Experimental evaluation of biodiversity response to dispersal barriers and patch primary producer biomass in Mediterranean streams Manuel Jesús López‑Rodríguez1 · Isabel Paz Moreno1 · Ignacio Peralta‑Maraver1,2 · Carmen Pérez‑Martínez1 · José Manuel Tierno de Figueroa3 Received: 10 June 2019 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Diversity at the local scale is determined by different, and often interacting factors. One factor that is suggested to be important in determining community structure is productivity, which is related to diversity. Though this relationship might depend on different factors, a hump-shaped, U-shaped or positive linear relationship seems to be frequent at the local scale. On the other hand, the concept of metacommunity considers how several communities are linked through dispersal. Here, we experimentally assessed how primary producer biomass and dispersal barriers drive diversity at the local scale in Mediterranean streams. We did this by creating a reach scale study system that resembled a metacommunity. We found that higher primary producer biomass promotes a saturating relationship with diversity. However, we did not detect any effect of the dispersal barriers on the responses. Thus, our results show that, at the local scale, patch primary producer biomass plays a more important role in determining the community structure and colonization than dispersal barriers. In the framework of metacommunity theory, our study system can be explained by combining assumptions of the “Mass-Effects” and the “Species-Sorting” archetypes, supporting a non-exclusive view of these hypotheses. Keywords Patch · Colonization · Dispersion · Macroinvertebrates · Metacommunity · Mediterranean stream
Introduction Traditionally, community structure and composition (and so diversity) were thought to be determined by differences in species niches promoting competition (Clements 1916) or differences in tolerances to environmental factors (Gleason 1926). Since the publication of “The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography” by Hubbell (2001), a new vision of factors controlling community diversity appeared Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-020-00757-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Manuel Jesús López‑Rodríguez [email protected] 1
Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
2
Department of Life Sciences, Roehampton University, London, UK
3
Departamento de Zoología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
in which the functional neutrality of species belonging to a given trophic level seemed to explain many real-world patterns (Mittelbach 2012). This neutral view of the species considers a metacommunity structure and is based on the importance of both dispersal and ecological drift, together with speciation, in the configuration
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