Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 103, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3601
Keywords
abundance; body size; diversity; litter depth; LTER; richness
Categories
Funding
- GAANN fellowship
- NSF [EF-1065844]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Ecologists investigated the abundance and distribution of three common taxa of litter invertebrates in six North American forests, finding that the relationship between body size and abundance varied and that litter depth only affected abundance in one forest. Invertebrate abundance was found to constrain species richness most of the time.
Ecologists search for rules by which traits dictate the abundance and distribution of species. Here we search for rules that apply across three common taxa of litter invertebrates in six North American forests from Panama to Oregon. We use image analysis to quantify the abundance and body size distributions of mites, springtails, and spiders in 21 1-m(2) plots per forest. We contrast three hypotheses: two of which focus on trait-abundance relationships and a third linking abundance to species richness. Despite three orders of magnitude variation in size, the predicted negative relationship between mean body size and abundance per area occurred in only 18% of cases, never for large bodied taxa like spiders. We likewise found only 18% of tests supported our prediction that increasing litter depth allows for high abundance; two-thirds of which occurred at a single deciduous forest in Massachusetts. In contrast, invertebrate abundance constrained species richness 76% of the time. Our results suggest that body size and habitat volume in brown food webs are rarely good predictors of variation in abundance, but that variation in diversity is generally well predicted by abundance.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available