Environmental factors indirectly reduce phytoplankton community stability via functional diversity

作者：Xiaoguang Zhang, Lu Tan, Qinghua Cai, Lin Ye · 发表于：Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3389/fevo.2022.990835 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Aquatic Ecosystems and Phytoplankton Dynamics、Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology and Behavior、Marine and coastal ecosystems

The biodiversity-stability relationship is a fundamental subject of ecological research. Considerable evidence demonstrates that biodiversity can either increase or decrease stability. Most relevant research mainly focuses on grassland and forest ecosystems. The biodiversity-stability relationship in aquatic ecosystems and the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. To fill the gap, we conducted a year-long study on the phytoplankton of reservoir ecosystems in the Xiangxi Bay of Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) to test the following hypotheses: (H1) phytoplankton species richness and functional diversity directly reduce phytoplankton community stability in reservoir ecosystems; (H2) nutrient enrichment and water temperature increasing directly reduce phytoplankton community stability; and (H3) nutrients and water temperature indirectly reduce phytoplankton community stability via biodiversity. The structural equation model (SEM) found that functional diversity (community-weighted means of traits and functional divergence) had significant negative correlations with phytoplankton community stability ( p < 0.05), while the species diversity had no significant correlation with phytoplankton community stability ( p > 0.05). This finding partially supported the hypothesis H1, which suggested that the functional diversity had a closer tie with stability than the species diversity. SEM did not find any direct effect of environmental factors on phytoplankton communit...