Seaweed functional diversity revisited: confronting traditional groups with quantitative traits ...
1. Macroalgal (seaweed) beds and forests fuel coastal ecosystems and are rapidly reorganising under global change, but quantifying their functional structure still relies on binning species into coarse groups on the assumption that they adequately capture relevant underlying traits. 2. To interrogat...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nvx0k6dpn https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.nvx0k6dpn |
| Summary: | 1. Macroalgal (seaweed) beds and forests fuel coastal ecosystems and are rapidly reorganising under global change, but quantifying their functional structure still relies on binning species into coarse groups on the assumption that they adequately capture relevant underlying traits. 2. To interrogate this ‘group gambit’, we measured 12 traits relating to competitive dominance and resource economics across 95 macroalgal species collected from the UK and widespread on North-East Atlantic rocky shores. We assessed the amount of trait variation explained by commonly-used traditional groups – (i) two schemes based on gross morphology and anatomy and (ii) two categorisations of vertical space use – and examined species reclassification into post hoc, so-called emergent groups arising from the functional trait dataset. We then offer an alternative, emergent grouping scheme of macroalgal functional diversity. 3. (i) Morphology and anatomy-based groups explained slightly more than a third of multivariate trait ... : 2.1. Sampling We measured eleven continuous and one categorical functional traits (Table 1) at the individual level across 95 erect intertidal macroalgal species, which spanned a great variety of form and function and hence, traditional functional groups (Table S1). Samples were collected from twelve rocky shores in the UK ranging from very sheltered to very exposed (Table S2): six sites in South Wales, four sites in Orkney (Scotland) and two sites in Cornwall (England). The collected species are commonly found on North-East Atlantic rocky shores (Ar Gall et al., 2016; Araújo, Sousa-Pinto, Bárbara, & Quintino, 2006; Martínez, Viejo, Carreño, & Aranda, 2012; Martins, Hawkins, Thompson, & Jenkins, 2007), and include species restricted to the region (~25% of species), more broadly distributed across multiple temperate regions (~35%), as well as cosmopolitan and non-native species (~40%). Sampling took place from May to September 2013 and 2015-2018 (Table S3). We collected an average of 6 replicates ... |
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