Functional redundancy in natural pico-phytoplankton communities depends on temperature and biogeography
| Autor: | C-Elisa Schaum, Duyi Zhong, Maria-Elisabetta Santelia, Luisa Listmann |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
Baltic Sea Ecology (disciplines) Biogeography Rare species Biodiversity pico-phytoplankton communities Biology global warming 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Natural (archaeology) 03 medical and health sciences Phytoplankton Ecosystem Biomass 030304 developmental biology Ecological stability 0303 health sciences Biomass (ecology) Ecology Global warming Functional redundancy Temperature Global Change Biology Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) functional redundancy Species richness General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Research Article |
| Zdroj: | Biology Letters |
| DOI: | 10.1101/2020.05.14.096123 |
| Popis: | Biodiversity affects ecosystem function, but how this relationship will pan out in a changing world is still a major question in ecology. It remains especially understudied for pico-phytoplankton communities, which contribute to carbon cycles and aquatic food webs year-round. Observational studies show a link between phytoplankton community diversity and ecosystem stability, but there is only scarce causal or empirical evidence. Here, we sampled phytoplankton communities from two biogeographically distinct (but close enough to not be confounded by differences in day length and precipitation) regions in the Southern Baltic Sea, and carried out a series of dilution/regrowth experiments across three assay temperatures. This allowed us to investigate the effects of loss of rare taxa and establish causal links in natural communities between species richness and several ecologically relevant traits (e.g. size, biomass production, and oxygen production), depending on sampling location and assay temperature. We found that the samples’ bio-geographical origin determined whether and how functional redundancy changed as a function of temperature for all traits under investigation. Samples obtained from the slightly warmer and more thermally variable regions showed overall high functional redundancy. Samples from the slightly cooler, less variable, stations showed little functional redundancy, i.e. function decreased the more species were lost from the community. The differences between regions were more pronounced at elevated assay temperatures. Our results imply that the importance of rare species and the amount of species required to maintain ecosystem function even under short-term warming (e.g. during heat waves) may differ drastically even within geographically closely related regions of the same ecosystem. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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