Abstract

In recent years, the relative importance of the processes driving metacommunity composition has aroused extensive attention and become a powerful approach to identify community patterns and their regulatory mechanisms. We investigated variations in the composition of benthic community in restored wetlands and natural wetlands in the Yellow River Delta (Shandong Province, China). First, spatial structures within each wetland were modeled with Moran eigenvector maps. Next, the variation in community structure among local environmental and spatial variables was partitioned using constrained ordination, and the “elements of metacommunity structure” analysis was used to determine the patterns of best fit for species distributions within metacommunities. Finally, the null model was used to analyze non-random patterns of species co-occurrence. The community structure of benthic invertebrates in restored wetlands and natural wetlands differed significantly. The benthic invertebrate metacommunity structure showed a nested distribution in restored wetlands and a quasi-Clementsian structure in natural wetlands. Pure environmental fractions and pure spatial fractions were critical in regulating benthic invertebrate metacommunities of restored wetlands. In natural wetlands, pure spatial fractions and the interaction between environmental and spatial factors (shared fractions) played a major role in the metacommunity. A species co-occurrence analysis showed that species co-occurred more frequently than expected by chance, demonstrating that biotic interactions were not the main driver of metacommunity structures in both wetland types. Accordingly, the benthic invertebrate metacommunity in estuarine wetlands following freshwater releases was mostly determined by environmental and spatial effects, which resulted in a metacommunity with nested distribution. These results are important for biodiversity protection and ecosystem management of estuarine wetlands in the Yellow River Delta.

Highlights

  • The mechanisms underlying both the patterns and maintenance of biodiversity within communities have been a core research topic in community ecology (Rosenzweig, 1995)

  • In natural wetlands, the benthic invertebrate community was mainly composed of annelids, bivalves, malacostracans, and gastropods (Supplementary Table 1)

  • The results of the Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis showed that the benthic invertebrate community structure of restored and natural wetlands were clearly divided into two groups (Figure 3)

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Summary

Introduction

The mechanisms underlying both the patterns and maintenance of biodiversity within communities have been a core research topic in community ecology (Rosenzweig, 1995). Understanding the relative importance of processes driving the composition of community is the main way to reveal the drivers of community assembly (Bell, 2010; Caruso et al, 2011). Discerning the relative importance of these factors has been a major challenge for understanding the assembly of ecological communities (Holyoak et al, 2005; Hildrew, 2009; Heino et al, 2015a). Knowledge on the determinants of local taxonomic diversity is the key to understanding ecological community composition (Daniel et al, 2019) and protecting biodiversity (Heino, 2013c)

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