lmguzman / climate_invertebrate_traits

Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions

This repository contains code and data associated with “Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions.”

Guzman, L. M.^, Trzcinski, M.^, Barberis, I., Céréghino, R., Srivastava, D., Gilbert, B., Pillar, V., de Omena, P., MacDonald, A. A., Corbara, B., Leroy, C., Bautista, F., Romero, G., Kratina, P., Debastiani, V., Gonçalves, A., Marino, N., Farjalla, V., Richardson, B., Richardson, M., Dézerald, O., Piccoli, G., Jocque, M., Montero, G. (2021) Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local environmental conditions. Ecography. 44 (3), 440-452. DOI ^Authors contributed equally

In a nutshell

We collated data from across the Neotropics on the abundance and distribution of bromeliad dwelling invertebrates. Following the paper by Céréghino, R. et al (2018), which described the axis of trait variation of the invertebrates, we estimated whether climate or local environmental conditions is more important at explaining the variation in the traits. We conclude that climate explains more variation in invertebrate trait composition within bromeliads than does local conditions. Importantly, climate mediated the response of traits to local conditions; for example, invertebrates with benthic life-history traits increased with bromeliad water volume only under certain precipitation regimes. Our ability to detect this and other patterns hinged on the compilation of multiple fine-grained datasets, allowing us to contrast the effect of climate vs. local conditions.

Our study was supported by CESAB.