THE BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SPECIES AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS: HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN THEIR JOINT IMPACT ON THE STRUCTURE OF BENTHOS COMMUNITIES

В.К. Шитиков, Т.Д. Зинченко, Л.В. Головатюк

Abstract


Ecological studies include quantitative assessments of relations between the natural and anthropogenic environmental factors and the biological properties (traits) of species that determine the conditions of their life and the mechanisms of their adaptation. It is often impossible to determine such conditions explicitly. However, they still may be assessed indirectly by analyzing the tables of abundance distribution of observable species vs. the known characteristics of the sites where abiotic variables were monitored. For a joint statistical analysis of three sets of such data, two published approaches are used in the present paper. The first one is double constrained correspondence analysis (dc-CA), which provides for a multidimensional ordination of species and sites with additional coordinate axes (factors and properties) so as to find a maximum of total explainable variation share. The second one is constructing a Bayesian logistic regression model. Its result is a normalized table of ecological affinity of each species to each biotope based on the totality of the initial data. These two approaches were tested against a single body of data available in the database of a long-term hydrobiological monitoring of meso-benthos of small and medium-size rivers in the Middle and Low Volga basin. We evaluated the statistical significance and proportions of the joint influences of the environmental conditions and the biological characteristic of species on the taxonomic structures of benthic communities. Based on the analysis of model parameters, the effects of defined biological traits and abiotic factors on the probability of the presence of a defined species in a defined community were ranked. For each river segment, the “dark diversity” i.e. the set of the species that theoretically may be expected to belong to a defined community but have not been found in it as yet was determined.

Keywords


freshwater benthos, Volga river basin, species traits, environmental variables, dc-CA, Bayesian models, dark diversity

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24855/biosfera.v15i4.869

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