Anthropogenic stress alters community concordance at the river-riparian interface
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
Organisms often respond in similar ways to environmental or spatial gradients, particularly at large spatial scales, but patterns at finer scales and across ecotones are less certain. It is important to understand these relationships at multiple spatial scales, as managers often need suitable surrogate taxa for conservation and monitoring purposes. We explored whether community concordance at the river-riparian interface was decoupled by increasing anthropogenic stress (a gradient of local land-use intensity) at 15 sites over three years within the LTER site, Rhine-Main Observatory, a low mountain river system in central Germany. We assessed concordance between four organism groups: riparian spiders and carabid beetles, benthic macroinvertebrates, and combined aquatic macrophytes and riparian plants. This represented three different linkages: (1) predator-prey, (2) direct competition, and (3) habitat associations. While there were no correlations in richness patterns, multivariate community structure was highly concordant between all groups. Anthropogenic stress strongly reduced links between riparian spiders and carabid beetles, likely resulting from their shared resource requirements. However, increasing concordance occurred between plants and other groups. We posit that patterns may be resulting from two processes: (1) linkages between directly competing species decouple with increasing anthropogenic stress, and (2) stronger coupling may occur between habitat providers and dependent species when overall habitat complexity is reduced. These results highlight the complex manner in which anthropogenic stress can influence ecosystems and the importance of considering community structure when exploring biodiversity patterns in basic and applied ecological research, particularly at small scales and for surrogate taxa development.
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2015. Anthropogenic stress alters community concordance at the river-riparian interface. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e798v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.798v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This manuscript will be submitted to Ecological Indicators for review.
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Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Author Contributions
Jonathan D Tonkin conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Stefan Stoll conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Sonja C Jähnig reviewed drafts of the paper.
Peter Haase reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding the deposition of related data:
Data is available upon request at the LTER-D data portal: http://data.lter-europe.net/deims/
Funding
This study was financed by Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU), Hesse’s Ministry of Environment, and the research funding program LOEWE (Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-oekonomischer Exzellenz) of Hesse’s Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and the Arts. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
