Movement of mud snails affects population dynamics, primary production and landscape heterogeneity in tidal flat ecosystems

Zhang, Heyue; Sun, Tao; Cao, Hong‐Lin; Zhang, Yue; Yang, Wei; Shao, Dongdong; Cui, Baoshan; Zhou, Zeng

doi:10.1007/s10980-021-01322-7

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 57 publications

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“…Dispersal and movements between habitat patches can maintain biodiversity at higher levels in connected habitats than in isolated habitats (Pulliam 1988;Gouhier, Guichard, and Menge 2010;Zhang et al 2021). Intermediate levels of connectivity, featuring some dispersal limitation but not complete isolation, allow diversity to be high and temporally dynamic in spatially structured communities (Leibold and Chase 2017;Leibold et al 2004;Boström, Jackson, and Simenstad 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An experimental test of dispersal limitation of species diversity in eelgrass meadows

Forbes,

Hessing-Lewis,

O’Connor

2024

Preprint

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Biogenic habitats, including eelgrass, support productive and diverse species assemblages in spatially heterogeneous seascapes. Eelgrass-associated faunal diversity depends not only on conditions within each eelgrass meadow but also on their probability of dispersing among eelgrass meadows in a seascape in which meadows are separated by soft sediments, kelp or rocky habitats. Experiments are required to establish dispersal limitation in communities. Here, we experimentally tested the hypothesis that dispersal limitation and edge effects influence local faunal diversity in eelgrass meadows. We manipulated habitat spacing and exposure of standardized substrate and quantified invertebrate colonization. We predicted that invertebrate species richness would decline with increasing distance from the meadow edge and that mobility traits would covary with species’ responses to distance. We also predicted that eelgrass edges would harbor communities distinct from the interior of the meadow and that these differences would covary with species’ trophic traits. We found that species richness decreased with increasing distance from meadows and this pattern was not explained by reduced abundance or filtering of species based on traits, consistent with dispersal limitation of diversity. Edges did not affect total community richness or abundance, and the only trait that varied with meadow-position was average body size, which was larger within the meadow interior. These results suggest that even short-distance dispersal limitation can structure the eelgrass invertebrate community but that communities of similar richness, trait profiles and abundance will colonize all available habitat in the absence of dispersal barriers.

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