Spider Functional Biodiversity is Positively Correlated with Plant Functional Biodiversity

Abstract

Community assembly is the result of ecological selection processes, dispersal processes, and random drift processes. Selection processes can cause coexisting species to be more similar or more different in traits, depending on the strength of environmental filtering or resource partitioning. Differences in functional traits are also known as functional diversity. The “stress-dominance hypothesis suggests that environmental stress causes environmental filtering and trait similarity; and a lack of stress causes greater resource partitioning and trait dissimilarity. While there have been some investigations of this in plants, there are very few, if any, studies of this in invertebrates. We chose spiders because they are readily found in every terrestrial habitat and because they exhibit a high degree of functional diversity in body size, body shape, eyes, and mouthparts.