Species-environment sorting explains latitudinal patterns in spatiotemporal β-diversity for freshwater macroinvertebrates

Understanding how and why β-diversity varies along latitude is a long-standing challenge in community ecology and rarely addressed in both space and time. We aimed to explore the spatiotemporal variations in macroinvertebrate β-diversity and their underlying drivers in eight biogeographic regions covering a substantial latitudinal gradient of more than 40 degrees. By combining β-diversity partitioning and distance decay of community similarity analyses, we found that subtropical β-diversity varies more in space relative to in time compared with temperate β-diversity, as we predicted. This is probably because subtropical β-diversity is shaped by species-environment sorting (SS), caused by habitat heterogeneity and species specialization, more strongly in space relative to in time than temperate β-diversity. Our study highlights the importance of SS in shaping latitudinal gradients of β-diversity in space and time., , This dataset consists of two XLSX files: Tiaoxi River_TR.xlsx and Huangshui River_HR.xlsx
More information about the data files in README., # Macroinvertebrate species and environmental data in the in the Tiaoxi River (TR) region and the Huangshui River (HR) region

Authors: Siwen He, Beixin Wang, Kai Chen, Li Ning, Janne Soininen Species-environment sorting explains latitudinal patterns in spatiotemporal -diversity

Correspondence: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) (S. He), [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) (B. Wang)

Description of files:

Tiaoxi River_TR.xlsx and Huangshui River_HR.xlsx contain the following information: 1) Abundance macroinvertebrate species dataset, 2) Environmental dataset.

Row labels: site_time (season/month and year)

Environmental dataset: col labels: Abbreviations of the environmental variables and spatial coordinates.

NH4-N:      ammonia nitrogen

TN  :            total nitrogen

TP  :          total phosphorus

PO4-P :       phosphate contents

NO3-N :      nitrate

CODMn:   potassium permanganate index

pH :          pH

pHmv :        physalis mottle virus
...