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Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland
A major challenge in ecology is understanding why certain species persist, while others decline, in response to environmental change. Trait-based comparative analyses are useful in this regard as they can help identify the key drivers of decline, and highlight traits that promote resistance to chang...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4655099/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26618083 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1410 |
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author | Powney, Gary D. Cham, Steve S.A. Smallshire, Dave Isaac, Nick J.B. |
author_facet | Powney, Gary D. Cham, Steve S.A. Smallshire, Dave Isaac, Nick J.B. |
author_sort | Powney, Gary D. |
collection | PubMed |
description | A major challenge in ecology is understanding why certain species persist, while others decline, in response to environmental change. Trait-based comparative analyses are useful in this regard as they can help identify the key drivers of decline, and highlight traits that promote resistance to change. Despite their popularity trait-based comparative analyses tend to focus on explaining variation in range shift and extinction risk, seldom being applied to actual measures of species decline. Furthermore they have tended to be taxonomically restricted to birds, mammals, plants and butterflies. Here we utilise a novel approach to estimate occurrence trends for the Odonata in Britain and Ireland, and examine trait correlates of these trends using a recently available trait dataset. We found the dragonfly fauna in Britain and Ireland has undergone considerable change between 1980 and 2012, with 22 and 53% of species declining and increasing, respectively. Distribution region, habitat specialism and range size were the key traits associated with these trends, where habitat generalists that occupy southern Britain tend to have increased in comparison to the declining narrow-ranged specialist species. In combination with previous evidence, we conclude that the lower trend estimates for the narrow-ranged specialists could be a sign of biotic homogenization with ecological specialists being replaced by warm-adapted generalists. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4655099 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-46550992015-11-27 Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland Powney, Gary D. Cham, Steve S.A. Smallshire, Dave Isaac, Nick J.B. PeerJ Biodiversity A major challenge in ecology is understanding why certain species persist, while others decline, in response to environmental change. Trait-based comparative analyses are useful in this regard as they can help identify the key drivers of decline, and highlight traits that promote resistance to change. Despite their popularity trait-based comparative analyses tend to focus on explaining variation in range shift and extinction risk, seldom being applied to actual measures of species decline. Furthermore they have tended to be taxonomically restricted to birds, mammals, plants and butterflies. Here we utilise a novel approach to estimate occurrence trends for the Odonata in Britain and Ireland, and examine trait correlates of these trends using a recently available trait dataset. We found the dragonfly fauna in Britain and Ireland has undergone considerable change between 1980 and 2012, with 22 and 53% of species declining and increasing, respectively. Distribution region, habitat specialism and range size were the key traits associated with these trends, where habitat generalists that occupy southern Britain tend to have increased in comparison to the declining narrow-ranged specialist species. In combination with previous evidence, we conclude that the lower trend estimates for the narrow-ranged specialists could be a sign of biotic homogenization with ecological specialists being replaced by warm-adapted generalists. PeerJ Inc. 2015-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC4655099/ /pubmed/26618083 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1410 Text en © 2015 Powney et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , 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) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Biodiversity Powney, Gary D. Cham, Steve S.A. Smallshire, Dave Isaac, Nick J.B. Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title | Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title_full | Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title_fullStr | Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title_full_unstemmed | Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title_short | Trait correlates of distribution trends in the Odonata of Britain and Ireland |
title_sort | trait correlates of distribution trends in the odonata of britain and ireland |
topic | Biodiversity |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4655099/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26618083 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1410 |
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