Predicting temporal variation in zooplankton beta diversity is challenging

Vanessa Guimarães Lopes, Christina W Castelo Branco, Betina Kozlowsky-Suzuki, Izidro F Sousa-Filho, Leonardo Coimbra e Souza and Luis Mauricio Bini

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-19

Abstract: Beta diversity, the spatial variation in species composition, has been related to different explanatory variables, including environmental heterogeneity, productivity and connectivity. Using a long-term time series of zooplankton data collected over 62 months in a tropical reservoir (Ribeirão das Lajes Reservoir, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil), we tested whether beta diversity (as measured across six sites distributed along the main axis of the reservoir) was correlated with environmental heterogeneity (spatial environmental variation in a given month), chlorophyll-a concentration (a surrogate for productivity) and water level. We did not found evidence for the role of these predictors, suggesting the need to reevaluate predictions or at least to search for better surrogates of the processes that hypothetically control beta diversity variation. However, beta diversity declined over time, which is consistent with the process of biotic homogenization, a worldwide cause of concern.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187499 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 87499&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0187499

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187499

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().