Ecological drivers of multiple facets of beta diversity in a lentic macroinvertebrate metacommunity

Community ecology has broadened considerably with the recognition that it is not only at the species-level data where biological patterns and their determinants should be studied. Rather, also functional and phylogenetic data should be examined, as they may provide important information for both basic ecology and applied fields such as conservation and bioassessment. We thus explored the distance decay of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic community compositions along spatial and environmental gradients within a boreal lake metacommunity. We used distance-based methods (i.e., Mantel test, Mantel correlograms and db-RDA) to examine different facets (i.e., taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic) and components (i.e., total, turnover and nestedness-resultant) in relation to spatial and environmental variables. We found that the species compositions of lake benthic invertebrate communities varied mostly along environmental gradients, but were also weakly related to spatial distances between lakes. We also showed that functional and phylogenetic compositions were solely related to environmental variation across the lakes, but these relationships were generally weak. Our exploration of different facets and components of beta diversity added to the knowledge of lake invertebrate communities by adding functional and phylogenetic views, which has rarely been done in studies of aquatic metacommunities. Such information is also important in valuing lakes for conservation and bioassessment because it is not only at the species-level data where ecological patterns and underlying mechanisms should be explored.