PARENT SESSION
Oral Session 4: Biodiversity I: Communities and Function.
Presiding: C Holzapfel and D Ellsworth
Monday, August 2, 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, Meeting Room B 110.
Connectivity, scale-dependence, and the productivity-diversity relationship.
Ryberg, Wade1, Chase, Jonathan1, 1 Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri
ABSTRACT- Despite decades of study, the relationship between productivity and diversity remains controversial. Variation observed in the productivity-diversity relationship has been attributed to multiple community processes, but recently, evidence suggests that an interaction between beta-diversity and the spatial scale at which the data are collected could produce variable patterns at different scales of observation. We show that the presence of scale-dependent patterns in the productivity-diversity relationship depends on the degree of connectance among localities. Less connected communities, exhibit greater dissimilarity or beta-diversity among localities. As compositional differences among local communities increase, the productivity-diversity relationship reveals a unimodal function at local scales and an asymptotic function at regional scales. More connected communities, exhibit less dissimilarity among localities. As compositional differences among local communities decrease, productivity-diversity relationships described at local and regional scales converge toward a unimodal pattern and scale-dependence disappears. Future empirical research should focus on the interacting behavior of connectivity with various scale-dependent processes determining community composition and the productivity-diversity relationship.
Key words: connectivity, scale-dependence, beta-diversity, productivity