Unravelling large-scale patterns and drivers of biodiversity in dry rivers
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Datry, Thibault
Corti, Roland
von Schiller, Daniel
Tockner, Klement
Stubbington, Rachel
Gessner, Mark O
Boyer, Frédéric
Ohlmann, Marc
Thuiller, Wilfried
Rioux, Delphine
Miquel, Christian
Albariño, Ricardo
Allen, Daniel C
Altermatt, Florian
et al.
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Abstract
More than half of the world's rivers dry up periodically, but our understanding of the biological communities in dry riverbeds remains limited. Specifically, the roles of dispersal, environmental filtering and biotic interactions in driving biodiversity in dry rivers are poorly understood. Here, we conduct a large-scale coordinated survey of patterns and drivers of biodiversity in dry riverbeds. We focus on eight major taxa, including microorganisms, invertebrates and plants: Algae, Archaea, Bacteria, Fungi, Protozoa, Arthropods, Nematodes and Streptophyta. We use environmental DNA metabarcoding to assess biodiversity in dry sediments collected over a 1-year period from 84 non-perennial rivers across 19 countries on four continents. Both direct factors, such as nutrient and carbon availability, and indirect factors such as climate influence the local biodiversity of most taxa. Limited resource availability and prolonged dry phases favor oligotrophic microbial taxa. Co-variation among taxa, particularly Bacteria, Fungi, Algae and Protozoa, explain more spatial variation in community composition than dispersal or environmental gradients. This finding suggests that biotic interactions or unmeasured ecological and evolutionary factors may strongly influence communities during dry phases, altering biodiversity responses to global changes.
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Nature Communications
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15
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
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Conservation and biodiversity
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Foulquier, A; Datry, T; Corti, R; von Schiller, D; Tockner, K; Stubbington, R; Gessner, MO; Boyer, F; Ohlmann, M; Thuiller, W; Rioux, D; Miquel, C; Albariño, R; Allen, DC; Altermatt, F; et al., Unravelling large-scale patterns and drivers of biodiversity in dry rivers, Nature Communications, 2024, 15, pp. 7233