Résumé: Questions Forest fragmentation affects biodiversity locally (alpha diversity) and beyond – at relatively larger scales (gamma diversity) – by increasing dispersal and recruitment limitations. Yet, does an increase in fragmentation affect the relationship between alpha and gamma diversity and what can we learn from it? Location Northern France. Methods We surveyed 116 forest patches across three fragmentation levels: none (continuous forest); intermediate (forest patches connected by hedgerows); and high (isolated forest patches). Plant species richness of both forest specialists and generalists was surveyed at five nested spatial resolutions across each forest patch: 1 m(2); 10 m(2); 100 m(2); 1,000 m(2); and total forest patch area. First, we ran log-ratio models to quantify the alpha-gamma relationship. We did that separately for all possible combinations of fragmentation level (none vs intermediate vs high) x spatial scale (e.g., alpha-1 m(2) vs gamma-10 m(2)) x species type (e.g., alpha-specialists vs gamma-specialists). We then used linear mixed-effects models to analyze the effect of fragmentation level, spatial scale, species type and all two-way interaction terms on the slope coefficient extracted from all log-ratio models. Results We found an interaction effect between fragmentation level and species type, such that forest specialists shifted from a linear (i.e., proportional sampling) to a curvilinear plateau (i.e., community saturation) relationship at low and high fragmentation, respectively, while generalists shifted from a curvilinear to a linear pattern. Conclusions The impact of forest fragmentation on the alpha-gamma relationship supports generalist species persistence over forest specialists, with contrasting mechanisms for these two guilds. As fragmentation increases, forest specialists shift from proportional sampling towards community saturation, thus reducing alpha diversity likely due to dispersal limitation. Contrariwise, generalists shift from community saturation towards proportional sampling, thus increasing alpha diversity likely due to an increase in the edge:core ratio. To ensure long-term conservation of forest specialists, one single large forest patch should be preferred over several small ones.

Résumé: Taxonomic nestedness, the degree to which the taxonomic composition of species-poor assemblages represents a subset of richer sites, commonly occurs in habitat fragments and islands differing in size and isolation from a source pool. However, species are not ecologically equivalent and the extent to which nestedness is observed in terms of functional trait composition of assemblages still remains poorly known. Here, using an extensive database on the functional traits and the distributions of 6316 tropical reef fish species across 169 sites, we assessed the levels of taxonomical vs functional nestedness of reef fish assemblages at the global scale. Functional nestedness was considerably more common than taxonomic nestedness, and generally associated with geographical isolation, where nested subsets are gradually more isolated from surrounding reef areas and from the center of biodiversity. Because a nested pattern in functional composition implies that certain combinations of traits may be represented by few species, we identified these groups of low redundancy that include large herbivore-detritivores and omnivores, small piscivores, and macro-algal herbivores. The identified patterns of nestedness may be an outcome of the interaction between species dispersal capabilities, resource requirements, and gradients of isolation among habitats. The importance of isolation in generating the observed pattern of functional nestedness within biogeographic regions may indicate that disturbance in depauperate and isolated sites can have disproportionate effects on the functional structure of their reef fish assemblages.

Résumé: Based on the framework of attribute diversity (a generalization of Hill numbers of order q), we develop a class of functional diversity measures sensitive not only to species abundances but also to trait-based species-pairwise functional distances. The new method refines and improves on the conventional species-equivalent approach in three areas: (1) the conventional method often gives similar values (close to unity) to assemblages with contrasting levels of functional diversity; (2) when a distance metric is unbounded, the conventional functional diversity depends on the presence/absence of other assemblages in the study; (3) in partitioning functional gamma diversity into alpha and beta components, the conventional gamma is sometimes less than alpha. To resolve these issues, we add to the attribute-diversity framework a novel concept: tau, the threshold of functional distinctiveness between any two species; here, tau can be chosen to be any positive value. Any two species with functional distance >= tau are treated as functionally equally distinct. Our functional diversity quantifies the effective number of functionally equally distinct species (or “virtual functional groups”) with all pairwise distances at least tau for different species pairs. We advocate the use of two complementary diversity profiles (tau profile and q profile), which depict functional diversity with varying levels of tau and q, respectively. Both the conventional species-equivalent method (i.e., tau is the maximum of species-pairwise distances) and classic taxonomic diversity (i.e., tau is the minimum of non-zero species-pairwise distances) are incorporated into our proposed tau profile for an assemblage. For any type of species-pairwise distance matrices, our attribute-diversity approach allows proper diversity partitioning, with the desired property gamma >= alpha and thus avoids all the restrictions that apply to the conventional diversity decomposition. Our functional alpha and gamma are interpreted as the effective numbers of functionally equally distinct species, respectively, in an assemblage and in the pooled assemblage, while beta is the effective number of equally large assemblages with no shared species and all species in the assemblages being equally distinct. The resulting beta diversity can be transformed to obtain abundance-sensitive Sorensen- and Jaccard-type functional (dis)similarity profiles. Hypothetical and real examples are used to illustrate the framework. Online software and R codes are available to facilitate computations.