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Re-Structuring of Marine Communities Exposed to Environmental Change: A Global Study on the Interactive Effects of Species and Functional Richness

Citation

Wahl, M and Link, H and Alexandridis, N and Thomason, JC and Cifuentes, M and Costello, MJ and da Gama, BAP and Hillock, K and Hobday, AJ and Kaufmann, MJ and Keller, S and Kraufvelin, P and Kruger, I and Lauterbach, L and Antunes, BL and Molis, M and Nakaoka, M and Nystrom, J and bin Radzi, Z and Stockhausen, B and Thiel, M and Vance, T and Weseloh, A and Whittle, M and Wiesmann, L and Wunderer, L and Yamakita, T and Lenz, M, Re-Structuring of Marine Communities Exposed to Environmental Change: A Global Study on the Interactive Effects of Species and Functional Richness, PLoS-One, 6, (5) Article e19514. ISSN 1932-6203 (2011) [Refereed Article]


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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

DOI: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019514

Abstract

Species richness is the most commonly used but controversial biodiversity metric in studies on aspects of community stability such as structural composition or productivity. The apparent ambiguity of theoretical and experimental findings may in part be due to experimental shortcomings and/or heterogeneity of scales and methods in earlier studies. This has led to an urgent call for improved and more realistic experiments. In a series of experiments replicated at a global scale we translocated several hundred marine hard bottom communities to new environments simulating a rapid but moderate environmental change. Subsequently, we measured their rate of compositional change (re-structuring) which in the great majority of cases represented a compositional convergence towards local communities. Re-structuring is driven by mortality of community components (original species) and establishment of new species in the changed environmental context. The rate of this re-structuring was then related to various system properties. We show that availability of free substratum relates negatively while taxon richness relates positively to structural persistence (i.e., no or slow re-structuring). Thus, when faced with environmental change, taxon-rich communities retain their original composition longer than taxon-poor communities. The effect of taxon richness, however, interacts with another aspect of diversity, functional richness. Indeed, taxon richness relates positively to persistence in functionally depauperate communities, but not in functionally diverse communities. The interaction between taxonomic and functional diversity with regard to the behaviour of communities exposed to environmental stress may help understand some of the seemingly contrasting findings of past research.

Item Details

Item Type:Refereed Article
Research Division:Biological Sciences
Research Group:Other Biological Sciences
Research Field:Global Change Biology
Objective Division:Environment
Objective Group:Ecosystem Assessment and Management
Objective Field:Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Marine Environments
UTAS Author:Hobday, AJ (Dr Alistair Hobday)
UTAS Author:Whittle, M (Mr Mark Whittle)
ID Code:77187
Year Published:2011
Web of Science® Times Cited:18
Deposited By:Zoology
Deposited On:2012-03-20
Last Modified:2017-11-01
Downloads:358 View Download Statistics

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