Direct and indirect effects of geographic and environmental factors on ant beta diversity across Amazon basin

Understanding the direct and indirect effects of niche and neutral processes in structuring species diversity is particularly challenging because environmental factors are often geographically structured. Here, we used Structural Equation Modeling to quantify direct and indirect effects of geographi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Oecologia 2022, Vol.198 (1), p.193-203
Main Authors: Guilherme, Diego Rodrigues, Pequeno, Pedro Aurélio Costa Lima, Baccaro, Fabrício Beggiato, Franklin, Elizabeth, dos Santos Neto, Cláudio Rabelo, Souza, Jorge Luiz Pereira
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Ants
Biodiversity
Biological diversity
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Community Ecology–Original Research
Density
Dispersal
Distance
Ecology
Environmental factors
Environmental gradient
Hydrology/Water Resources
Life Sciences
Mathematical models
Multivariate statistical analysis
Niches
Normalized difference vegetative index
Plant Sciences
River basins
Species diversity
Surveying
Temperature
Vegetation
Vegetation index
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Summary:Understanding the direct and indirect effects of niche and neutral processes in structuring species diversity is particularly challenging because environmental factors are often geographically structured. Here, we used Structural Equation Modeling to quantify direct and indirect effects of geographic distance, the Amazon River’s opposite margins, and environmental differences in temperature, precipitation, and vegetation density (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index—NDVI) on ant beta diversity (Jaccard’s dissimilarity) across Amazon basin. We used a comprehensive survey of ground-dwelling ant species from 126 plots distributed across eight sampling sites along a broad environmental gradient. We found that geographic distance and NDVI differences were the major direct predictors of ant composition dissimilarity. The major indirect effect was that of temperature through NDVI, whereas precipitation neither had direct or indirect detectable effects on beta diversity. Thus, ant compositional dissimilarity seems to be mainly driven by a combination of isolation by distance (through dispersal limitation) and selection imposed by vegetation density, and indirectly, by temperature. Our results suggest that neutral and niche processes have been similarly crucial in driving the current beta diversity patterns of Amazonian ground-dwelling ants.
ISSN:0029-8549
1432-1939
DOI:10.1007/s00442-021-05083-7