Biogeography of Mediterranean amphipods associated with Posidonia oceanica meadows
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biogeography, Ecology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- Amphipods, Posidonia oceanica, network ecology, endemisms, paleobiogeography, connectivity, diversity, modularity
- Copyright
- © 2018 Bellisario et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Biogeography of Mediterranean amphipods associated with Posidonia oceanica meadows. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27285v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27285v1
Abstract
Although amphipods are key components of the macro-fauna associated with Posidonia oceanica meadows, no studies focussed to date on the structure and diversity of such assemblages across the Mediterranean Sea. Here, we studied whether amphipod diversity reflects generalised biodiversity patterns across the Mediterranean by applying a network approach using incidence data mined from literature to infer biogeographic modules and the biogeographic roles of associated localities. We tested if the observed pattern reflected a geographic component and was linked to species range extension by means of a multivariate analysis. Modularity highlighted four distinct modules characterized by a geographic subdivision driven by the main Mediterranean biogeographic divides, and differences in species diversity along a NW-SE gradient. Modules showed both different biogeographic roles of associated localities and different range extension of amphipod species associated with different modules. The biogeographic roles of localities provided by modularity identified the highest amphipod diversity in the Central-Western Mediterranean, followed by Tunisian coasts. This pattern may be explained by a mix of species persistence and post-Last Glacial Maximum expansion, as suggested by the paleogeographic history of the host seagrass and the ecology of associated amphipods.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplemental Materials & Methods
Additional methods describing the analysis of current and past literature to extract all available information about the distribution of amphipods on Posidonia oceanica at Mediterranean basin level. For each locality, the bibliographic source has been indicated, and aggregated incidence data for each identified module have been reported in Table S2.
Amphipod incidence on Posidonia oceanica meadows mined from literature
Raw data representing the incidence of amphipod species in different localities mined from literature. References can be found in Supplemental Materials & Methods.