Gavish, Y orcid.org/0000-0002-6025-5668, Giladi, I and Ziv, Y (2019) Partitioning species and environmental diversity in fragmented landscapes: do the alpha, beta and gamma components match? Biodiversity and Conservation, 28 (3). pp. 769-786. ISSN 0960-3115
Abstract
To understand patterns of alpha, beta and gamma diversities in fragmented landscapes we need to explore the three scale components in relation to potential drivers in a scale-dependent manner. Often, the drivers themselves can be partitioned to alpha, beta and gamma diversities. Thus, one can hypothesize that the scale-components of species diversity and drivers’ diversity match, i.e., that species alpha diversity is mainly explained by drivers’ alpha diversity, beta by beta and gamma by gamma. Here, we explore this ‘scale-matching’ hypothesis for spiders in two fragmented agricultural landscapes. In each landscape, we sampled spiders and their potential prey in 12 patches. Then, we sub-sampled pseudo-landscapes in which we calculated spider alpha, beta and gamma diversities using multiplicative diversity-partitioning. Next, we used variance partitioning analysis to explore the relative contribution of eleven explanatory variables from five thematic groups (sampling intensity, area, connectivity, habitat diversity and prey diversity), while further partitioning the habitat and prey diversities to their corresponding alpha, beta and gamma diversities. We found considerable evidence for scale-matching, with spiders’ alpha and beta diversities explained mostly by the corresponding alpha and beta diversities (respectively) of prey and/or habitat. We further found a strong effect of connectivity on spider beta diversity, but not on alpha and gamma diversities. For spiders gamma diversity, a cross-scale effect was observed. Our results suggest that multiple drivers from multiple scales interact in structuring patterns of spider alpha, beta and gamma diversities in agro-ecosystems, yet the strongest effects are of those drivers that match in scale.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019, The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Agroecosystems; Araneae; Community composition; Effective diversity; Fragmentation; Meta-community; Scale |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 15 Mar 2019 13:46 |
Last Modified: | 12 May 2019 23:03 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10531-018-01691-7 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:143673 |