Siberian Federal University

Supplementary material

Application 1 (.pdf, 430 KB)

Issue

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Biology. 2021 14 (2)

Authors

Zinchenko, Tatiana D.; Shitikov, Vladimir K.; Golovatyuk, Larisa V.

Contact information

Zinchenko, Tatiana D.: Samara Federal Research Scientific Center RAS, Institute of Ecology of Volga River Basin RAS Togliatti, Russian Federation; ; ORCID: 0000–0002–4435–1166; Shitikov, Vladimir K.: Samara Federal Research Scientific Center RAS, Institute of Ecology of Volga River Basin RAS Togliatti, Russian Federation; ORCID: 0000–0002–8385–1913; Golovatyuk, Larisa V.: Samara Federal Research Scientific Center RAS, Institute of Ecology of Volga River Basin RAS Togliatti, Russian Federation; ORCID: 0000–0003–4773–5277

Keywords

community structure; macrozoobenthos; environmental data; variable selection; Instability index; Kullback-Leibler divergence; virtual species distribution

Abstract

Statistical procedures for quantifying the relationships between the community structure and abiotic variables start with selecting a minimum set of uncorrelated environmental factors that determine the ecological conditions essential for each of the species. This is especially important when constructing models of spatial distribution of species which are key to ecology of communities and conservation of nature. The aim of the study is to explore whether some applications of information theory can be used to rank environmental factors with respect to their contribution to the formation of the ecological structure of aquatic communities. We consider the applicability of the instability index, which is a special case of the Kullback-Leibler entropy divergence and reflects the information gain from the displacement of a particular realization of a random variable relative to its mean value. Using of instability indices allows to reduce multidimensional data sets on species structure of communities and abiotic factors to lower dimension sets of commensurate standardized variables and to explore the relationships between the latter. The initial data we used were the results of the long-term (1990–2019) hydrobiological survey of benthic communities in small and medium-sized rivers in the Middle and Lower Volga regions. We consider the indices of instability calculated for each of 147 taxa of macrozoobenthos and 8 geophysical and hydrochemical indicators. Based on these data, we constructed random forest regression models and calculated potential weights of environmental factors that determine ecological preferences of species. The most significant explanatory variables were used to construct distribution maps of «virtual species», which were compared with the corresponding empirical data. A habitat suitability map of chironomids (Diptera, Chironomidae), the Prodiamesinae subfamily, is presented. Instability indices can be effectively used for exploratory analysis of various ecosystems, e. g. ranking habitats according to the degree of environmental instability and / or species associations, selecting the most informative abiotic variables that determine the population density of the taxa, etc.

Pages

119–132

DOI

10.17516/1997-1389-0344

Paper at repository of SibFU

https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/141374

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).