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Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds

A combination of local and regional factors and stochastic forces is expected to determine the occurrence of species and the structure of communities. However, in most cases, our understanding is incomplete, with large amounts of unexplained variation. Using functional groups rather than individual...

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Autor principal: McCann, Michael James
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4488069/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26121636
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131980
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author McCann, Michael James
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description A combination of local and regional factors and stochastic forces is expected to determine the occurrence of species and the structure of communities. However, in most cases, our understanding is incomplete, with large amounts of unexplained variation. Using functional groups rather than individual species may help explain the relationship between community composition and conditions. In this study, I used survey data from freshwater lakes and ponds to understand factors that determine the presence of the floating plant functional group in the northeast United States. Of the 176 water bodies surveyed, 104 (59.1%) did not contain any floating plant species. The occurrence of this functional group was largely determined by local abiotic conditions, which were spatially autocorrelated across the region. A model predicting the presence of the floating plant functional group performed similarly to the best species-specific models. Using a permutation test, I also found that the observed prevalence of floating plants is no different than expected by random assembly from a species pool of its size. These results suggest that the size of the species pool interacts with local conditions in determining the presence of a functional group. Nevertheless, a large amount of unexplained variation remains, attributable to either stochastic species occurrence or incomplete predictive models. The simple permutation approach in this study can be extended to test alternative models of community assembly.
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spelling pubmed-44880692015-07-02 Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds McCann, Michael James PLoS One Research Article A combination of local and regional factors and stochastic forces is expected to determine the occurrence of species and the structure of communities. However, in most cases, our understanding is incomplete, with large amounts of unexplained variation. Using functional groups rather than individual species may help explain the relationship between community composition and conditions. In this study, I used survey data from freshwater lakes and ponds to understand factors that determine the presence of the floating plant functional group in the northeast United States. Of the 176 water bodies surveyed, 104 (59.1%) did not contain any floating plant species. The occurrence of this functional group was largely determined by local abiotic conditions, which were spatially autocorrelated across the region. A model predicting the presence of the floating plant functional group performed similarly to the best species-specific models. Using a permutation test, I also found that the observed prevalence of floating plants is no different than expected by random assembly from a species pool of its size. These results suggest that the size of the species pool interacts with local conditions in determining the presence of a functional group. Nevertheless, a large amount of unexplained variation remains, attributable to either stochastic species occurrence or incomplete predictive models. The simple permutation approach in this study can be extended to test alternative models of community assembly. Public Library of Science 2015-06-29 /pmc/articles/PMC4488069/ /pubmed/26121636 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131980 Text en © 2015 Michael James McCann http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
McCann, Michael James
Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title_full Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title_fullStr Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title_full_unstemmed Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title_short Local and Regional Determinants of an Uncommon Functional Group in Freshwater Lakes and Ponds
title_sort local and regional determinants of an uncommon functional group in freshwater lakes and ponds
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4488069/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26121636
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131980
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