Multi-taxon patterns from high Andean peatlands: assessing climatic and landscape variables

Abstract

The relationship between environment and organisms has been a central focus of community ecology. Different approaches have been made for analyzing different aspects of this interaction, but more integral studies are missing to understand the implications of the environment for the whole biodiversity at regional scales. In this work, we assess the structure of three biological groups (aquatic macroinvertebrates, birds, and plants) with different ecological characteristics in peatlands from the Argentinean Puna. High Andean peatlands are “oasis” of highly productive wetlands within a matrix of arid highland desert, and they present particular eco-geographic attributes. We found that the eco-geographic characterization of 47 sampled peatlands segregated into two main dimensions of variation: one driven by the elevation and related climatic gradient and the other by landscape features and productivity. The three biological groups analyzed differ in terms of the association between composition and the type of environment. While compositional differences in birds and plants are better explained by the first PCA axis than the second one, the opposite is true for aquatic macroinvertebrates. To enhance the biological interpretation of differences between groups of sites (dichotomization guided by signs of PCA axes scores), we obtained their list of indicator taxa. These differences should be considered to understand the implications of the environment for the whole biodiversity at regional scales. This study highlights the relevance of integrating different organisms when considering community patterns associated with eco-geographic gradients, and related management and conservation issues.