Spatial and temporal analysis of beta diversity in the Barro Colorado Island forest dynamics plot, Panama

Background: Ecologists are interested in assessing the spatial and temporal variation in ecological surveys repeated over time. This paper compares the 1985 and 2015 surveys of the Barro Colorado Forest Dynamics plot(BCI), Panama,divided into 1250(20 m × 20 m) quadrats.Methods, spatial analysis: Total beta diversity was measured as the total variance of the Hellinger-transformed community data throughout the BCI plot. Total beta was partitioned into contributions of individual sites(LCBD indices), which were tested for significance and mapped.Results, spatial analysis: LCBD indices indicated the sites with exceptional community composition. In 1985,they were mostly found in the swamp habitat. In the 2015 survey, none of the swamp quadrats had significant LCBDs.What happened to the tree community in the interval?Methods, temporal analysis: The dissimilarity in community composition in each quadrat was measured between time 1(1985) and time 2(2015). Temporal Beta Indices(TBI) were computed from abundance and presence-absence data and tested for significance. TBI indices can be decomposed into B = species(or abundances-per-species) losses and C = species(or abundances-per-species) gains. B-C plots were produced; they display visually the relative importance of the loss and gain components, through time, across the sites.Results, temporal analysis: In BCI, quadrats with significant TBI indices were found in the swamp area, which is shrinking in importance due to changes to the local climate. A published habitat classification divided the BCI forest plot into six habitat zones. Graphs of the B and C components were produced for each habitat group. Group 4(the swamp) was dominated by species(and abundances-per-species) gains whereas the five other habitat groups were dominated by losses, some groups more than others.Conclusions: We identified the species that had changed the most in abundances in the swamp between T1 and T2.This analysis supported the hypothesis that the swamp is drying out and is invaded by species from the surrounding area. Analysis of the B and C components of temporal beta diversity bring us to the heart of the mechanisms of community change through time: losses(B) and gains(C) of species, losses and gains of individuals of various species. TBI analysis is especially interesting in species-rich communities where we cannot examine the changes in every species individually.

Intraspecific maternal competition in insect parasitoids induces summer diapause in insect parasitoids

Organisms often live in unpredictable environments and have to adopt life history strategies that optimize their fitness under these conditions.According to bet-hedging theory,individuals can reduce variation in fitness outcomes by investing in different strategies at the same time.For arthropods,facultative summer diapause enables survival during dry and hot periods of the year,and can be triggered by a decrease in resource abundance. However,the effect of resource depletion on diapause induction has never been disentangled from the effect of the perception of the presence of competitors.Using two solitary parasitoid species of cereal aphids as a model system,Aphidius avenae (Haliday)and Aphidius rhopalosiphi (De Stefani-Perez)(Hymenoptera:Braconidae),we tested whether (i)low absolute host density and/or (ii)high levels of parasitoid females'competition lead to maternal-induced summer diapause in parasitoid offspring.Under summer-like climatic conditions,emerging parasitoid females were (i)reared alone and exposed to different host densities (from 5 to 130 aphids),or (ii)reared together with competing females (from 2 to 20 females)and then exposed individually to 50 aphids.For both parasitoid species, low aphid densities did not induce summer diapause.However,the incidence of summer diapause increased up to a maximum of 11% with increasing levels of competition expe rienced by female parasitoids.More than 60% of the females produced both diapausing and nondiapausing offspring after being kept at the two highest competition densities. Such a "spreading-the-risk"strategy has likely evolved to optimize parasitoid fitness by preventing the following generation from exposure to low populations of suitable hosts and high mortality from superparasitism.These results provide the first experimental evidence of direct maternal competition-induced diapause in insects,and may change the way we apprehend the evolution of arthropod seasonal ecology,by considering intraspecific competition.

A statistical procedure to assess the significance level of barriers to gene flow

Although several methods are available to study the extent of isolation by distance （IBD） among natural populations, comparatively few exist to detect the presence of sharp genetic breaks in genetic distance datasets. In recent years, Monmonier＇s maximum-difference algorithm has been increasingly used by population geneticists. However, this method does not provide means to measure the statistical significance of such barriers, nor to determine their relative contribution to population differentiation with respect to IBD. Here, we propose an approach to assess the significance of genetic boundaries. The method is based on the calculation of a multiple regression from distance matrices, where binary matrices represent putative genetic barriers to test, in addition to geographic and genetic distances. Simulation results suggest that this method reliably detects the presence of genetic barriers, even in situations where IBD is also significant. We also illustrate the methodology by analyzing previously published datasets. Conclusions about the importance of genetic barriers can be misleading if one does not take into consideration their relative contribution to the overall genetic structure of species.