Establishing the South Australian Macrobenthic Traits (SAMT) database: A trait classification for functional assessments

Lam-Gordillo, Orlando; Baring, Ryan; Dittmann, Sabine

doi:10.1002/ece3.7040

Cited by 11 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The functional traits selected describe behavioral, morphological, and physiological attributes of benthic macrofauna, and are considered as effects traits as they are directly or indirectly related to several ecosystem functions including nutrient cycling and sediment transport (Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020a). Trait information was obtained from the South Australia Macrobenthic Trait (SAMT) database (Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020b). The SAMT database applied a fuzzy coding procedure assigning scores from 0 to 1, with 0 being no affinity and 1 being high affinity to a trait (for details see Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020b).…”

Section: Selection Of Traits and Trait Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Trait information was obtained from the South Australia Macrobenthic Trait (SAMT) database (Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020b). The SAMT database applied a fuzzy coding procedure assigning scores from 0 to 1, with 0 being no affinity and 1 being high affinity to a trait (for details see Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020b). This resulted in the compilation of three data matrices (1) "taxa abundance by site matrix, " in this case the data collected from our surveys; (2) "taxa by traits matrix, " obtained from the SAMT database; and (3) the combinations of the previous two: "traits by site matrix" (Bremner et al, 2006;Bremner, 2008).…”

Section: Selection Of Traits and Trait Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To contribute to the knowledge on patterns of taxonomic and functional diversity and their links with ecosystem functioning (e.g., Gammal et al, 2019;Taupp and Wetzel, 2019;Shojaei et al, 2021), this study investigated benthic communities in soft sediments along the southern temperate coast of South Australia, where traits of benthic fauna have been recently compiled (Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020b), which enabled a comparative assessment of taxonomic and functional perspectives. The aims of this field study were to (i) assess the taxonomic and functional diversity of benthic communities across contrasting habitats (coastal embayment, gulfs, and lagoon), each representing a typical habitat of the southern temperate Australian coastline, and (ii) evaluate the relationships between benthic macrofauna, functional traits and environmental conditions across these habitats.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taxonomic and Functional Patterns of Benthic Communities in Southern Temperate Tidal Flats

2021

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Coastal ecosystems are vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances which can cause loss of benthic macrofauna and their ecosystem functioning. Despite the importance of functional assessments for conservation and management, knowledge gaps persist on the generality of how the diversity and functional traits of benthic communities influence ecosystem functioning. We investigated eight sites in three different habitats across ~1,260 km of coastline, to evaluate patterns between taxonomic and functional diversity of benthic macrofauna, and the relationship between benthic macrofauna, functional traits and environmental conditions. A total of 74 benthic macrofauna taxa were identified. Significant differences across sites and season were found for metrics based on taxonomic and functional traits. Multivariate analysis revealed spatial-temporal differences, which were more evident based on taxa than functional traits. Functional diversity also showed spatial and temporal differences and was positively correlated with the number of taxa. The dominant functional traits modalities were deposit feeders, with large (>20 mm) body size, burrowers, bioirrigators, deeper than 3 cm in sediments, and irregular morphology. Novel Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVM) uncovered several site-dependent relationships between taxa, traits and environmental conditions. Functional redundancy was lowest in a highly modified lagoon, and highest in a more pristine embayment. The outcomes from this study showed site-dependent patterns of benthic communities based on either taxonomic or functional metrics, highlighting that both perspectives are complementary to obtain a holistic understanding of the functioning in marine sediments under environmental change.

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Section: Selection Of Traits and Trait Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Selection Of Traits and Trait Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taxonomic and Functional Patterns of Benthic Communities in Southern Temperate Tidal Flats

2021

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“…Bhowmik & Mandal, 2021; Bremner et al., 2003; D'Alessandro et al., 2020; Van der Linden et al., 2012, 2016; Zhong et al., 2020), although an increase in the number of studies carried out in estuaries in tropical regions has been observed in recent times (e.g. Duarte et al., 2020; Lam‐Gordillo et al., 2020; Medeiros, Heino, et al., 2021; Medeiros, Paiva, et al., 2021; Van der Linden et al., 2017; Wouters et al., 2018). In general, these studies aim to understand how environmental characteristics affect benthic community functions in estuaries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taxonomic richness and its relationship to the functional diversity of polychaetes in tropical estuaries

Gomes,

Jovem‐Azevêdo,

de Melo

et al. 2024

Marine Ecology

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Biological diversity can be evaluated by the taxonomic and functional components. This study aimed to assess the relationship between taxonomic richness with the functional diversity components [functional richness (FRic), functional evenness (FEve) and functional divergence (FDiv)] and the functional trait dominance of polychaetes. In addition, we evaluated the environmental parameters that shape the functional structure in six tropical estuaries in north‐eastern Brazil. Three estuaries have a continuous environmental gradient (typical tropical), and the other three estuaries have no defined environmental gradient (semiarid tropical). We identified significant differences in the dominance of feeding strategy and habitat between estuaries, demonstrating that the functional space of the communities is not equally occupied. Also, the substrate particle size composition was correlated with the functional structure. FRic showed a positive relationship with taxonomic richness, regardless of the type of estuary. As taxonomic richness increases, the probability of different combinations of functional categories added to a community also increases. FEve and FDiv seem to be independent of taxonomic richness. Therefore, it is important to simultaneously evaluate diversity's taxonomic and functional components, considering the complementarity of the information provided by these diversity measures.

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“…Trait-based studies have covered various aquatic taxa, such as phytoplankton (Pálffy et al, 2013;Du et al, 2022), periphyton (Bichoff et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2022), zooplankton (Kuczyńska-Kippen et al, 2020;Shen et al, 2022), macroinvertebrates (Pallottini et al, 2017;Belmar et al, 2019), and fish (Brind'Amour et al, 2011;Toussaint et al, 2016). They have also examined diverse geographic regions, including North America (Boucek and Rehage, 2014;Sinclair et al, 2021), Europe (Belmar et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2019), Australia (Galego de Oliveira et al, 2019;Lam-Gordillo et al, 2020), and Asia (Matsuzaki et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2022). Functional diversity is generally governed by two deterministic processes underlying community assembly (Mouchet et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining functional diversity of lotic fish communities with river health assessment based on multi-metric chemical pollution and biological integrity index models

Jargal

Mamun²,

Choi³

et al. 2022

Front. Environ. Sci.

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Trait-based functional studies are widely used to elucidate the relationships between ecological indicators and environmental parameters as well as to predict functional change in aquatic biota in response to various types of human disturbance. Clarifying how functional traits of aquatic organisms depend on environmental conditions can facilitate aquatic conservation and management, but determining the importance of these traits to ecological river health requires further investigation. As fish play a key role in the assessment of ecological conditions, we examined the relevance of the functional diversity of lotic fish to the river health assessment using multi-metric models of water pollution (mWPI) and fish-based biological integrity (mIBI). Twelve fish traits related to food acquisition, environmental stability, and mobility were used for the functional analyses. Chemical river health was highly sensitive to downstream organic matter and nutrient pollution according to mWPI. Based on the present gradient of chemical health and water chemical variables, we identified three water quality groups (G-I, G-II, and G-III). G-I, G-II, and G-III showed low, intermediate, and high levels of water quality degradation, respectively. Spatially significant differences among these groups were observed for both the taxonomic and functional structures of lotic fish as well as ecological river health based on mIBI. The dominance of sensitive species was high in G-I, whereas tolerant and exotic species contributed strongly to the species compositions of G-II and G-III. Functional richness and dispersal were significantly reduced in G-III, and their decreases correlated with ecological health and the loss of species that are insectivorous, rheophilic, and sensitive to water pollution. Regarding redundancy analyses, both the models of functional trait metrics (F = 8.06, p < 0.001) and mIBI metrics (F = 4.88, p < 0.01) indicated good performance in terms of the variation in water quality and chemical river health parameters. Overall, the functional trait-based diversity of lotic fish is significant to the assessment of ecological river health and reflects water chemical quality. This association arises because niche occupation in functional space by all species, along with their abundance distribution, is highly responsive to the loss of species with sensitive traits due to water pollution.

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Establishing the South Australian Macrobenthic Traits (SAMT) database: A trait classification for functional assessments

Abstract: Trait-based approaches have become topical in ecological research for understanding the relationship between species (biodiversity) and ecosystem functioning, ecosystem processes, ecosystem services, or responses to anthropogenic disturbances (Bolam et al., 2016;

Cited by 11 publications

References 35 publications

Taxonomic and Functional Patterns of Benthic Communities in Southern Temperate Tidal Flats

Taxonomic and Functional Patterns of Benthic Communities in Southern Temperate Tidal Flats

Taxonomic richness and its relationship to the functional diversity of polychaetes in tropical estuaries

Combining functional diversity of lotic fish communities with river health assessment based on multi-metric chemical pollution and biological integrity index models

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