What North America's skeleton crew of megafauna tells us about community disassembly
What North America's skeleton crew of megafauna tells us about community disassembly
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2016.2116
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发表时间：
2017-01-11
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Davis, Matt
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Davis, Matt
功能特性多样性越来越多地被用来模拟未来群落结构的变化，尽管人们对群落分解对功能多样性的影响知之甚少。通过跟踪北美大型哺乳动物动物群的功能多样性，从更新世末期的大型动物群灭绝到现在，我表明与预期相反，功能独特的物种并不比功能多余的物种更有可能灭绝。这使得总体功能丰富度的损失不会比预期的更糟，因为类似的分类丰富度下降。然而，相对于前人类基线，当前物种所处的功能空间并不是随机的，可能更好地解释了生态系统功能的变化，而不是总功能丰富度的下降。史前灭绝使许多现存物种在功能上与世隔绝，未来的灭绝将导致功能丰富度的更快下降。
Functional trait diversity is increasingly used to model future changes in community structure despite a poor understanding of community disassembly's effects on functional diversity. By tracking the functional diversity of the North American large mammal fauna through the End-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction and up to the present, I show that contrary to expectations, functionally unique species are no more likely to go extinct than functionally redundant species. This makes total functional richness loss no worse than expected given similar taxonomic richness declines. However, where current species sit in functional space relative to pre-anthropogenic baselines is not random and likely explains ecosystem functional changes better than total functional richness declines. Prehistoric extinctions have left many extant species functionally isolated and future extinctions will cause even more rapid drops in functional richness.