Abstract
Although there is some evidence that larger species could be more prone to population declines, the potential role of size traits in determining changes in community composition has been underexplored in global-scale analyses. Here, we combine a large cross-taxon assemblage time series database (BioTIME) with multiple trait databases to show that there is no clear correlation within communities between size traits and changes in abundance over time, suggesting that there is no consistent tendency for larger species to be doing proportionally better or worse than smaller species at local scales.
Highlights
There is some evidence that larger species could be more prone to population declines, the potential role of size traits in determining changes in community composition has been underexplored in global-scale analyses
We tested whether the size of a species is correlated with the change in abundance through time using the publicly available BioTIME database[23]
After cleaning and standardizing the names associated with the records, we linked six fundamental ‘size’ traits from four openly accessible trait databases representing four broad guilds: adult body mass from a database of amniote life history traits[24], adult body length and qualitative body size of marine species from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) database[25], plant maximum height and seed mass from the TRY database[26] and maximum body length of fish from a compilation[27] based on data in the FishBase repository[28]
Summary
There is some evidence that larger species could be more prone to population declines, the potential role of size traits in determining changes in community composition has been underexplored in global-scale analyses. We tested whether the size of a species is correlated with the change in abundance through time using the publicly available BioTIME database[23].
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