Species‐Area Relationship for Stream Fishes

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Abstract. We sampled riffle and pool habitats of small streams in Minnesota, Illinois, and Panama to examine variation in species-area relationships within and between the respective fish faunas. For six of the seven steams studied, habitat volume was a better predictor of species richness than was habitat area, and number of individuals was a better predictor of species richness than habitat volume. Slopes of species-volume relationships were similar among regions, but the number of species per unit volume was greater in Panama. Multiple regression analyses indicated that knowledge of habitat complexity and volume did not enhance appreciably the capability of linear models to predict species richness from number of individuals in the sample. These results support the hypothesis that species-area relationships may often be epiphenomena stemming from the more comprehensive community "samples" intercepted by larger habitat patches. Although number of individuals was the best single predictor of species richness, habitat structure and type clearly influenced species' distributions in some streams, thereby indicating that speciesarea relationships were not strictly sampling phenomena. An index of habitat complexity based on depth, current, and bottom type was correlated with species richness in two Panama streams. Also, the abundance of individual species was more likely to be correlated with habitat volume in Panama than in Illinois or Minnesota, and species relative abundances were more similar between years in Panama than in Illinois or Minnesota streams, especially in pools. These patterns suggest that in streams subject to strong seasonal and annual environmental variation, habitat features are poorer predictors of fish distribution and abundance than in streams subject to less environmental variability. We speculate that annual variability in reproductive success and harsh winters interact to maintain imbalance between the fish assemblages and their habitat in Minnesota. Weak relationships between species richness and habitat volume or complexity may be indicative of population variability and the predominance of extinction/recolonization processes in community organization. Ecological Society of America

Effects of isolation and environmental variables on fish community structure in the Brazilian Amazon Madeira-Purus interfluve

“…The observed influence of physical variables on species composition is similar to findings obtained in other studies conducted in temperate (Gorman and Karr 1978;Martin-Smith, 1998;Oberdorff et al, 2001) and tropical streams (Angermeier and Schlosser, 1989;Barrella and Petrere Jr., 1994;Araújo-Lima et al, 1999;Uieda and Barretto, 1999;Mendonça et al, 2005) and is in accordance with the river continuum concept (Vannotte et al, 1980), where species abundance and richness increase with enlargement of the stream channel due to greater heterogeneity or increased habitat availability. The observation of physical variation related to the size of the sampled water bodies, although an expected result, is strongly dependent on the selection of streams for sampling.…”

“…However, fish community structure is also thought to be influenced by biotic and abiotic factors, which operate and interact on various spatial and temporal scales (Angermeier and Winston, 1998;Matthews, 1998). On a regional scale, physical characteristics, such as stream size (Angermeier and Karr, 1984), water velocity (Mendonça et al, 2005), depth (Angermeier and Karr, 1984;Martin-Smith, 1998), and habitat diversity (Gorman and Karr 1978;Angermeier and Schlosser, 1989), or physico-chemical properties, such as electrical conductivity (Taylor et al, 1993;Mérigoux et al, 1998) and pH (Townsend et al, 1983), have also been considered to be factors that govern the occurrence and distribution of fish species.…”

Short-term sodium inputs attract microbi-detritivores and their predators

“…In BFWs, leaf litter functions both as consumer habitat and food (Wardle, 2002). Litter depth is patchy and as with aquatic systems, deeper litter (i.e., a great volume of leaf litter) as habitat is positively correlated with invertebrate abundance and richness (Angermeier and Schlosser, 1989;Ettema and Wardle, 2002;Shik and Kaspari, 2010). Average litter depth on plots varied from 0.28 to 13.37 cm, which is representative of the natural heterogeneity in tropical forest litter depth (Fauth et al, 1989;N.A.…”

Application of the ELOHA Framework to Regulated Rivers in the Upper Tennessee River Basin: A Case Study

“…One major limitation in this approach was determining fish richness for very large river systems, in which baseline information is rare. Species-area relationships are complicated by granularity (spatial resolution) (Palmer and White 1994) and habitat complexity (Angermeier and Schlosser 1989). For each hydrologic index, models are presented in order of hydrologic index only (bottom), hydrologic index and strongest predictor variable (middle), and the best model (top).…”