Species assortment or habitat filtering: a case study of spider communities on lake islands |
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Authors: | Werner Ulrich Izabela Hajdamowicz Marcin Zalewski Marzena Stańska Wojciech Ciurzycki Piotr Tykarski |
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Institution: | 1.Department of Animal Ecology,Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń,Toruń,Poland;2.Department of Zoology,University of Podlasie,Siedlce,Poland;3.Centre for Ecological Research,Polish Academy of Sciences,Dziekanów Le?ny,Poland;4.Department of Forest Botany, Faculty of Forestry,Warsaw University of Life Sciences SGGW,Warsaw,Poland;5.Department of Ecology, Faculty of Biology,University of Warsaw,Warsaw,Poland |
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Abstract: | Competition theory predicts that species of similar ecological niches are less likely to coexist than species with different
niches, a process called species assortment. In contrast, the concept of habitat filtering implies that species with similar
ecological requirements should co-occur more often than expected by chance. Here we use environmental and ecological data
to assess patterns of co-occurrence of regional communities of spiders distributed across two assemblies of lake islands in
northern Poland. We found aggregated and random co-occurrences of species of the same genus and a significant tendency of
species segregation across genera. We also found that species of the same genus react similarly to important environmental
variables. A comparison of ecological traits of species of the local communities with those expected from a random sample
from the regional Polish species pool corroborated partly the habitat filtering hypothesis. On the other hand, we did not
find evidence for species assortment. Our results also imply that at least some observed species co-occurrences result from
niche differentiation. |
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