Erosion of phylogenetic diversity in Neotropical bat assemblages: findings from a whole-ecosystem fragmentation experiment

Sabhrina G Aninta,Christoph F J Meyer,Adrià López-Baucells,Ricardo Rocha

doi:10.1007/s10531-019-01864-y

Abstract

The traditional focus on taxonomic diversity metrics for investigating species responses to habitat loss and fragmentation has limited our understanding of how biodiversity is impacted by habitat modification. This is particularly true for taxonomic groups such as bats which exhibit species-specific responses. Here, we investigate phylogenetic alpha and beta diversity of Neotropical bat assemblages across two environmental gradients, one in habitat quality and one in habitat amount. We surveyed bats in 39 sites located across a whole-ecosystem fragmentation experiment in the Brazilian Amazon, representing a gradient of habitat quality (interior-edge-matrix, hereafter IEM) in both continuous forest and forest fragments of different sizes (1, 10, and 100 ha; forest size gradient). For each habitat category, we quantified alpha and beta phylogenetic diversity, then used linear mixed-effects models and cluster analysis to explore how forest area and IEM gradient affect phylogenetic diversity. We found that the secondary forest matrix harboured significantly lower total evolutionary history compared to the fragment interiors, especially the matrix near the 1 ha fragments, containing bat assemblages with more closely related species. Forest fragments ≥ 10 ha had levels of phylogenetic richness similar to continuous forest, suggesting that large fragments retain considerable levels of evolutionary history. The edge and matrix adjacent to large fragments tend to have closely related lineages nonetheless, suggesting phylogenetic homogenization in these IEM gradient categories. Thus, despite the high mobility of bats, fragmentation still induces considerable levels of erosion of phylogenetic diversity, suggesting that the full amount of evolutionary history might not be able to persist in present-day human-modified landscapes.

Highlights

Humans have fundamentally changed the face of the Earth, with negative side-effects for biodiversity across all major biomes
To elucidate how habitat fragmentation affects the evolutionary dimension of bat diversity, we investigated the changes in phylogenetic alpha and beta diversity of Amazonian bat assemblages across two environmental gradients, one in habitat quality (IEM gradient) and one in habitat amount, in the experimentally fragmented landscape of the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), the world’s largest and longest-running experimental study of habitat fragmentation (Haddad et al 2015), investigating a total of 12 habitat categories
The simulated null communities for PD further showed that SESPD values were considerably lower in the edges and matrix surrounding forest fragments compared to forest interior smaller fragments do not exhibit considerably lower S ESPD than larger fragments (Fig. 2a), further corroborating the strength of IEM gradient in explaining the phylogenetic richness of phyllostomid bats across the BDFFP

Summary

Introduction

Humans have fundamentally changed the face of the Earth, with negative side-effects for biodiversity across all major biomes. Recent studies assessing the effect of habitat fragmentation on tropical taxa have started to incorporate evolutionary information using phylogenetic diversity metrics in addition to species richness (Frishkoff et al 2014; Santos et al 2014; Cisneros et al 2015, 2016; Aguirre et al 2016; Frank et al 2017). By doing so, these studies were able to uncover patterns previously undetected by studies with a sole focus on the taxonomic dimension of biodiversity. This pattern, often referred to as phylogenetic clustering, indicates a strong effect of habitat filtering (Vamosi et al 2009)

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Conclusion