Species similarity - distance relationship in wetlands: effect of disturbance intensity

Disturbance is considered to be one of the main factors influencing variations in species diversity. While many experimental and observational studies provide a good understanding of how disturbance maintains the α-diversity, we know little about how disturbance influences β-diversity, and the effects of disturbance intensity on spatial species turnover are lacking. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effects of disturbance on patterns of species similarity in wetland communities, and to identify how disturbance intensity affects the species similarity - distance relationship. In our study, four isolated wetland remnants under different agricultural drainage ditch densities were surveyed in Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. Wetland disturbance was assessed by agricultural ditch densities, and species similarity was quantified by the Jaccard index. A simple measure of environmental distance was obtained by using water level and five soil variables, and a corresponding measure of geographical distance was made between pairs of plots from each site. Based on these data, we estimated rates of distance decay through regression of log-transformed compositional similarity against both environmental and geographical distance for pair-wise comparisons of wetland plots from each site. One key finding of our research is that disturbance intensity does influence the species similarity - distance relationship. At each site, species similarity decreased significantly with distance, and both effects of geographical and environmental distance were statistically significant. The results indicate that with disturbance intensity increasing, the distance decay rate decreases.