Spatio-temporal change in the relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species diversity

Abstract

Beta diversity plays an important role in mediating species diversity and therefore improves our understanding of species-diversity patterns. One principal theoretical framework exists for such patterns, the “habitat-heterogeneity hypothesis (HHH)”, which postulates a positive relationship between species diversity and habitat heterogeneity. Although HHH is widely accepted, spatial and temporal variability has been found in the relationship between diversity and heterogeneity. Species turnover has been proposed as the main factor explaining spatial variation in the relationship between species diversity and habitat heterogeneity. In this study, we tested the role of species turnover in explaining spatial and temporal variability on diversity–heterogeneity relationship in a Mediterranean ecosystem, using beetles as the study organisms. A hierarchical design including different habitats and years was used to test our hypothesis. Using different multivariate analyses, we tested for spatial and temporal variability in beta diversity, and in the beetle diversity–heterogeneity relationship using two diversity indices. Our study showed that beetle composition changed spatially and temporally, although temporal change was evident only between sampling periods but not between years. Notably, there was spatial and temporal change in the relationship between habitat descriptors and beetle diversity. Nevertheless, there was no correlation between the changes in beetle composition with the changes in the habitat-heterogeneity relationships. In this Mediterranean system, spatial and temporal changes in the diversity–heterogeneity relationships cannot be predicted by species turnover, and other mechanisms need to be explored to satisfactorily explain this variability.