| Title: |
Understanding temporal variability across trophic levels and spatial scales in freshwater ecosystems |
| Authors: |
Siqueira, T; Hawkins, CP; Olden, JD; Tonkin, J; Comte, L; Saito, VS; Anderson, TL; Barbosa, GP; Bonada, N; Bonecker, CC; Cañedo-Argüelles, M; Datry, T; Flinn, MB; Fortuño, P; Gerrish, GA |
| Publisher Information: |
Wiley |
| Publication Year: |
2024 |
| Collection: |
Griffith University: Griffith Research Online |
| Subject Terms: |
Freshwater ecology; Biogeography and phylogeography; Ecology; Zoology; Ecological applications |
| Description: |
A tenet of ecology is that temporal variability in ecological structure and processes tends to decrease with increasing spatial scales (from locales to regions) and levels of biological organization (from populations to communities). However, patterns in temporal variability across trophic levels and the mechanisms that produce them remain poorly understood. Here we analyzed the abundance time series of spatially structured communities (i.e., metacommunities) spanning basal resources to top predators from 355 freshwater sites across three continents. Specifically, we used a hierarchical partitioning method to disentangle the propagation of temporal variability in abundance across spatial scales and trophic levels. We then used structural equation modeling to determine if the strength and direction of relationships between temporal variability, synchrony, biodiversity, and environmental and spatial settings depended on trophic level and spatial scale. We found that temporal variability in abundance decreased from producers to tertiary consumers but did so mainly at the local scale. Species population synchrony within sites increased with trophic level, whereas synchrony among communities decreased. At the local scale, temporal variability in precipitation and species diversity were associated with population variability (linear partial coefficient, β = 0.23) and population synchrony (β = −0.39) similarly across trophic levels, respectively. At the regional scale, community synchrony was not related to climatic or spatial predictors, but the strength of relationships between metacommunity variability and community synchrony decreased systematically from top predators (β = 0.73) to secondary consumers (β = 0.54), to primary consumers (β = 0.30) to producers (β = 0). Our results suggest that mobile predators may often stabilize metacommunities by buffering variability that originates at the base of food webs. This finding illustrates that the trophic structure of metacommunities, which integrates variation in ... |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
Ecology; Siqueira, T; Hawkins, CP; Olden, JD; Tonkin, J; Comte, L; Saito, VS; Anderson, TL; Barbosa, GP; Bonada, N; Bonecker, CC; Cañedo-Argüelles, M; Datry, T; Flinn, MB; Fortuño, P; Gerrish, GA; et al., Understanding temporal variability across trophic levels and spatial scales in freshwater ecosystems, Ecology, 2024, 105 (2), pp. e4219; https://hdl.handle.net/10072/432468 |
| DOI: |
10.1002/ecy.4219 |
| Availability: |
https://hdl.handle.net/10072/432468; https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4219 |
| Rights: |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ; © 2023 The Authors. Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. ; open access |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.5D969C09 |
| Database: |
BASE |