2020 ESA Annual Meeting (August 3 - 6)

PS 53 Abstract - Comparing species richness and phylogenetic diversity of avian communities along environmental gradients in Han river, South Korea

Who-Seung Lee, Environmental Assessment Group, Korea Environment Institute, Sejong, Korea, Republic of (South)
Background/Question/Methods

Environmental gradient can influence the distribution and abundance of organisms. Seoul, South Korea has been undergoing rapid urbanisation and had become the largest city. Han river is a major river what is the fourth longest on the Korean peninsula and flows through Seoul into the Yellow Sea. Unfortunately, nothing has been published on the structure and function of avifaunas. Here I present the results of 10 years-long monitoring of the avifaunas, exploring temporal/spatial variation in its taxonomic, phylogenetics diversity and species richness. I accessed 10,000 trees from the all birds phylogeny (under the option “Hackett All Speices: a set of 10000 trees with 9993 OUTs each”) on www.birdtree.org and generated wto maximum clade credibility trees with posterior probabilities. All analyses were performed using R and package ‘Picante’.

Results/Conclusions

I found bird communities to be taxonomically depauperate and dominated by a small subset of common species in downstream. Broad patterns of phylogenetic community similarity typically resembled. There was significant temporal variation in phylogenetic structure owing to the urbanization and habitat structure through river. Although the urban avian assemblage is of limited regional conservation value, it may still offer significant biodiversity services and represent one of new points of contact for local people with biodiversity. Furthermore, results show that functional diversity and composition are partially coupled, suggesting that although functional diversity is influenced by the environmental filtering of particular traits, it also reflects other ecological mechanisms (e.g. competitive interactions among species).