"Model for understanding eco-evolutionary processes" by Alejandro Martinez Garcia (Pres 23: 5ISAE)
This presentation was a part of the 5th International Symposium on Anchialine Ecosystems (5ISAE), held in Kailua-Kona November 3-5, 2022.
Presentation 23: "Coastal aquifer as model for understanding eco-evolutionary processes"
Session 6: Worldwide - Biological Sciences
Presentation Author: Alejandro Martinez (1)
Affiliation: (1) Water Research Institute – National Research Council of Italy
Presentation Abstract: Animal communities inhabiting anchialine environments are a useful model to investigate general and peculiar evolutionary patterns and processes in marine habitats. Anchialine environments are land-locked water bodies of marine origin that are distributed world-wide. They are comparable to islands for terrestrial habitats as they encompass young discrete habitats with ecological conditions comparable to the sea, thus providing independent replicates of comparable evolutionary processes. Most anchialine habitats investigated previously harbor high endemism, disharmonic communities, species with unique sets of troglomorphic features, and ancient animal lineages interpreted as living fossils. During this talk we will explore diversity patterns of fauna associated with coastal aquifers using the Stygofauna Mundi dataset, an open source tool of ca. 350,000 records for ca. 20,000 species in 36,000 access points all over the world. We will explore these data in order to test the effect of ecological and geological parameters on the number of species, species composition and functional diversity in each cave and subterranean system, while we account for the influence of sampling intensity on the analyses by including the number of samples and number of published papers explicitly in the analyses.
The highest species diversity was found in the Caribbean and Mediterranean basins: two areas with many caves covering a wide range of ecological conditions, as both basins include marine, anchialine and freshwater subterranean habitats. However, the number of papers per area explained a high proportion of the variation observed in our data, with a taxonomical bias favoring crustaceans. Our results indicate that sampling bias should be carefully considered when drawing conclusions from large-scale analyses, and that we still need further sampling, especially in groups other than crustaceans, to better understand the generality of the processes driving global patterns in subterranean biodiversity.