Search

Geographical gradients in species diversity have long fascinated biogeographers and ecologists. However, the extent and generality of the effects of the important factors governing functional diversity (FD) patterns are still debated, especially for the freshwater domain. We examined the relationship between lake productivity and functional diversity of waterbirds sampled from 35 lakes and reservoirs in northern China with a geographic coverage of over 5 million km2. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the causal relationships between geographic position, climate, lake productivity, and waterbird FD. We found unambiguous altitudinal and longitudinal gradients in lake productivity and waterbird FD, which were strongly mediated by local environmental factors. Specifically, we found (a) lake productivity increased northeast and decreased with altitude. The observed geographic and altitudinal gradients were driven by climatic conditions and nutrient availability, which collectively explained 93% of the variations in lake productivity; (b) waterbird FD showed similar geographic and altitudinal gradients; the environmental factors which had direct and/or indirect effects on these gradients included climate and lake area, which collectively explained more than 39% of the variation in waterbird FD; and 3) a significant (p =.029) causality between lake productivity and waterbird FD was confirmed. Nevertheless, the causality link was relatively weak in comparison with climate and lake area (the standardized path coefficient was 0.55, 0.23, and 0.03 for climate, lake area, and productivity, respectively). Our study demonstrates how the application of multivariate technique (e.g., SEM) enables the illustration of complex causal paths in ecosystems, enhancing mechanistic explanations that underlie the observed broadscale biodiversity gradients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inland and estuary wetlands that characterized by different natural environment perform distinctly in soil carbon (C) sink. It was deemed that estuary wetland has a higher organic C accumulation rate than inland wetland, due to its higher primary production and tidal organics input, thus having higher organic C sink capacity. While from CO 2 budge in view, whether does the large organic input from tide restrict CO 2 sequestration capacity of estuary wetland has not been discussed comparing with inland wetland. In this study, inland and estuary wetlands were selected to study the potential of CO 2 sequestration capacity. It was found that inland wetland had most of soil organic carbon (SOC) derived from plant C, which brought remarkable organic C content and nourished higher microbial biomass, dehydrogenase, and β_glucosidase than estuary wetland. The estuary wetland instead accumulated less SOC, a considerable proportion of which came from tidal waters, therefore supporting lower microbial biomass and enzyme activities than that in inland wetland. However, estuary wetland was evaluated having higher capability in SOC mineralization than inland wetland in consideration of soil respiration (SR) and SR quotient. It was concluded that tidal organic C accelerated the SOC mineralization in estuarine wetland, thus weakening the CO 2 sequestration. These results implied the importance of pollution control for reservation CO 2 sink function in estuarine wetland., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)