Hu He, Yan Li, Kai Peng, You Zhang, Robert P Rutter, Jussi Jyväsjärvi, Heikki Hämäläinen, David Kelly, Jonathan M Chase, Chrysoula Ntislidou, Olga Loskutova, Javier Alcocer, Daniele Jovem-Azevêdo, Joseline Molozzi, Jianjun Wang, Min Zhang, Kuanyi Li, Zhengwen Liu, Liselotte S Johansson, Martin Søndergaard, Yongjiu Cai, Haijun Wang, Erik Jeppesen
The island species-area relationship (ISAR) describes how species richness increases with increasing area of a given island or island-like habitat, such as freshwater lakes. While the ISAR is one of the most common phenomena observed in ecology, there is variation in both the form of the relationship and its underlying mechanisms. We compiled a global data set of benthic macroinvertebrates from 524 shallow freshwater lakes, ranging from 1 to 293,300 ha in area. We used individual-based rarefaction to determine the degree to which ISAR was influenced by mechanisms other than passive sampling (larger islands passively sample more individuals from the regional pool and, therefore, have more species than smaller islands), which would bias results away from expected relationships between rarefied species richness (and other measures that capture relative abundances) and lake area...
November 17, 2023: Journal of Animal Ecology