Compositional uniqueness and species contribution to beta diversity of aquatic macrophyte metacommunities from coastal wetlands

Abstract

The partitioning of overall beta diversity into local contributions (LCBD) and species contributions (SCBD) has enhanced the understanding of the organization of metacommunities. Here, we evaluated LCBD and SCBD of aquatic macrophyte metacomunnities from 29 subtropical coastal wetlands, covering an extension of 640 km, in southern Brazil. Furthermore, we assessed the environmental uniqueness, considering both the physical and chemical variables of water in wetlands, as well as climatic variables. We assessed the environmental and spatial correlates of LCBD and the environmental correlates of SCBD. We expected that (i) more unique communities would be found in environmentally more unique wetlands; (ii) the compositional uniqueness would also be related to climatic variables that determine the hydrological changes in wetlands; (iii) the contribution of emergent species to beta diversity would be lower than of floating and submerged species. The compositional uniqueness did not present a clear spatial structure, being positively related to uniqueness in water chemistry and negatively to the mean air temperature during the driest quarter. The species contribution to beta diversity was higher for floating species than for emergent ones. Moreover, SCBD correlated to climatic variables and presented a positive relationship with site occupation, suggesting that more frequent species in terms of site occurrence" contribute most to beta diversity. Our results show the importance of local environmental and broader climatic predictors in determining the compositional uniqueness of macrophyte communities and the species contributions to overall beta diversity in the coastal wetlands of southern Brazil.