Abstract
ABSTRACT The characterization of species' functional traits is a major step in the understanding and description of communities in natural habitats. The classification of species into functional groups is a useful tool to identify redundancy and uniqueness. We studied the fish community of a pristine freshwater wetland in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve by analysing two multidimensional functions: food acquisition and locomotion. We investigated changes in the functional group structure between habitats (permanent and temporary pools) and seasons (dry and wet). Six functional groups with different ecological characteristics were detected, two of which had high functional redundancy and three of them were represented by single species with unique ecological functions. In permanent pools during the dry season, functional group richness and diversity were lower, while evenness was higher. During the wet season, all functional groups were detected and similar functional group structure was found between habitats. These results suggest an effect of environmental filtering during the dry season and niche complementarity during the wet season.
Highlights
Classical approaches to understand changes in diversity are based on the analysis of species richness, abundance, and diversity/evenness indices (Morin, 2011)
High functional redundancy was found within group VI and group V, which are represented by members of the Poeciliidae and Cichlidae families, respectively
Group I, III and IV were formed by a single species (B. belizanus, O. aenigmaticum and R. octofasciata, respectively), which represent unique ecological functions in this wetland
Summary
Classical approaches to understand changes in diversity are based on the analysis of species richness, abundance, and diversity/evenness indices (Morin, 2011). The study of functional diversity has emerged with the objective of incorporating specific attributes of species into the analysis of changes in taxonomic diversity (Tilman et al, 1997; Rosenfeld, 2002; Scherer-Lorenzen, 2005; Cadotte et al, 2011). A functional niche is analogous to an ecological niche and represents a n-dimensional hypervolume in a functional space, where the axes represent the key functions associated with different functional traits (Rosenfeld, 2002). Functional traits are those biological traits that influence
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