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| Aim In Europe, the relationships between species richness and latitude differ for lentic (standing water) and lotic (running water) species. Freshwater animals are highly dependent on suitable habitat, and thus the distribution of available habitat should strongly influence large-scale patterns of species richness. We tested whether habitat availability can account for the differences in species richness patterns between European lentic and lotic freshwater animals.
Location Europe.
Methods We compiled occurrence data of 1959 lentic and 2445 lotic species as well as data on the amount of lentic and lotic habitats across 25 pre-defined biogeographical regions of European freshwaters. We used the range of elevation of each region as a proxy for habitat diversity. We investigated the relationships between species richness, habitat availability and habitat diversity with univariate and multiple regression analyses.
Results Species richness increased with habitat availability for lentic species but not for lotic species. Species richness increased with elevational range for lotic species but decreased for lentic species. For both groups, neither habitat availability nor diversity could account for previously reported latitudinal patterns in species richness. For lotic species, richness declined with latitude, whereas there was no relationship between habitat availability and latitude. For lentic species, richness showed a hump-shaped relationship with latitude, whereas available habitat increased with latitude.
Main conclusions Habitat availability and diversity are poor predictors of species richness of the European freshwater fauna across large scales. Our results indicate that the distributions of European freshwater animals are probably not in equilibrium and may still be influenced by history, namely the recurrent European glaciations and possible differences in post-glacial recolonization. The distributions of lentic species appear to be closer to equilibrium than those of lotic species. This lends further support to the hypothesis that lentic species have a higher propensity for dispersal than lotic species. | |
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