Abstract
The ongoing biodiversity crisis reinforces the urgent need to unravel diversity patterns and the underlying processes shaping them. Although taxonomic diversity has been extensively studied and is considered the common currency, simultaneously conserving other facets of diversity (e.g., functional diversity) is critical to ensure ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services. Here, we explored the effect of key climatic factors (temperature, precipitation, temperature seasonality, and precipitation seasonality) and factors reflecting human pressures (agricultural land, urban land, land-cover diversity, and human population density) on the functional diversity (functional richness and Rao’s quadratic entropy) and species richness of amphibians (68 species), reptiles (107 species), and mammals (176 species) in Europe. We explored the relationship between different predictors and diversity metrics using generalized additive mixed model analysis, to capture non-linear relationships and to account for spatial autocorrelation. We found that at this broad continental spatial scale, climatic variables exerted a significant effect on the functional diversity and species richness of all taxa. On the other hand, variables reflecting human pressures contributed significantly in the models even though their explanatory power was lower compared to climatic variables. In most cases, functional richness and Rao’s quadratic entropy responded similarly to climate and human pressures. In conclusion, climate is the most influential factor in shaping both the functional diversity and species richness patterns of amphibians, reptiles, and mammals in Europe. However, incorporating factors reflecting human pressures complementary to climate could be conducive to us understanding the drivers of functional diversity and richness patterns.
Highlights
The multiple processes and factors acting simultaneously and shaping biodiversity patterns at different scales constitute a long-standing puzzle for ecologists and biogeographers [1,2]
The analysis of functional diversity patterns along environmental gradients, including land-use changes and human pressures, is a valuable tool to unlock the role of different factors shaping biodiversity patterns and to predict possible shifts in ecosystem functioning under the prism of global change [11]
Arid areas along the coastline of Southeastern Europe were poorer in terms of functional richness for amphibians than for reptiles, with reptiles having the highest values in these regions
Summary
The multiple processes and factors acting simultaneously and shaping biodiversity patterns at different scales constitute a long-standing puzzle for ecologists and biogeographers [1,2]. Other aspects of biodiversity such as functional diversity reflecting species’ functional traits within communities and ecosystems [4] might provide a more detailed and integrated interpretation of diversity patterns and species composition [5,6]. Functional diversity is quantified by arranging species in a functional trait space according to their functional trait values [9] This representation allows us to measure various aspects of functional diversity such as functional richness (i.e., the overall volume of trait space (niche) occupied by species in a community) [10] or Rao’s quadratic entropy (i.e., the functional distance between all pairs of species within a community) [9]. The analysis of functional diversity patterns along environmental gradients, including land-use changes and human pressures, is a valuable tool to unlock the role of different factors shaping biodiversity patterns and to predict possible shifts in ecosystem functioning under the prism of global change [11]
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