Quantifying spatial scaling patterns and their local and regional correlates in headwater streams: Implications for resilience

Ecology and Society
By: , and 

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Abstract

The distribution of functional traits within and across spatiotemporal scales has been used to quantify and infer the relative resilience across ecosystems. We use explicit spatial modeling to evaluate within- and cross-scale redundancy in headwater streams, an ecosystem type with a hierarchical and dendritic network structure. We assessed the cross-scale distribution of functional feeding groups of benthic invertebrates in Swedish headwater streams during two seasons. We evaluated functional metrics, i.e., Shannon diversity, richness, and evenness, and the degree of redundancy within and across modeled spatial scales for individual feeding groups. We also estimated the correlates of environmental versus spatial factors of both functional composition and the taxonomic composition of functional groups for each spatial scale identified. Measures of functional diversity and within-scale redundancy of functions were similar during both seasons, but both within- and cross-scale redundancy were low. This apparent low redundancy was partly attributable to a few dominant taxa explaining the spatial models. However, rare taxa with stochastic spatial distributions might provide additional information and should therefore be considered explicitly for complementing future resilience assessments. Otherwise, resilience may be underestimated. Finally, both environmental and spatial factors correlated with the scale-specific functional and taxonomic composition. This finding suggests that resilience in stream networks emerges as a function of not only local conditions but also regional factors such as habitat connectivity and invertebrate dispersal.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Quantifying spatial scaling patterns and their local and regional correlates in headwater streams: Implications for resilience
Series title Ecology and Society
DOI 10.5751/ES-06750-190315
Volume 19
Issue 3
Year Published 2014
Language English
Publisher Ecological Society of America
Publisher location Ottawa
Contributing office(s) Coop Res Unit Seattle
Description art15: 11 p.
Larger Work Type Article
Larger Work Subtype Journal Article
Larger Work Title Ecology and Society
Country Sweden
Other Geospatial Krycklan River
Online Only (Y/N) N
Additional Online Files (Y/N) N
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