Taxonomic and Functional Diversity of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Assemblages in Reservoirs of South Korea

Da-Yeong Lee, Dae-Seong Lee and Young-Seuk Park ()
Additional contact information
Da-Yeong Lee: Department of Biology, College of Science, Kyung Hee University, Dongdaemun, Seoul 02447, Republic of Korea
Dae-Seong Lee: Department of Biology, College of Science, Kyung Hee University, Dongdaemun, Seoul 02447, Republic of Korea
Young-Seuk Park: Department of Biology, College of Science, Kyung Hee University, Dongdaemun, Seoul 02447, Republic of Korea

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: Numerous community indices have been developed to quantify the various aspects of communities. However, indices including functional aspects have been less focused on. Here, we examined how community composition varies in response to the environment and discovered the relationship between taxonomic diversity and functional diversity while considering the environment. Macroinvertebrate communities were collected from 20 reservoirs in South Korea. To characterize functional diversity, functional traits in four categories were considered: generation per year, adult lifespan, adult size, and functional feeding groups. Based on their community composition, we classified the reservoirs using hierarchical cluster analysis. Physicochemical and land use variables varied considerably between clusters. Non-metric multidimensional scaling indicated differences between reservoirs and clusters in terms of structure, functional diversity, and environmental variables. A self-organizing map was used to categorize functional traits, and network association analysis was used to unravel relationships between functional traits. Our results support the characteristics of species’ survival strategies such as r- and K-selection. Functional richness exhibited a relationship with taxonomic diversity. Our findings suggest that different types of diversity could play complementary roles in identifying biodiversity. Our findings should prove useful in developing new criteria for assessing freshwater ecosystem health, as well as in evaluating and predicting future alteration of benthic macroinvertebrate communities facing anthropogenic disturbances.

Keywords: macroinvertebrate assemblage; community metric; taxonomic; functional diversity; community index; community diversity index; biological monitoring; self-organizing map (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/673/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/673/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2022:i:1:p:673-:d:1020220

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().