Geographical gradients in the biodiversity of Chinese freshwater molluscs: Implications for conservation

Abstract

Aim: Large-scale diversity patterns are generated by different but not mutually exclusive mechanisms. However, understanding of multiple facets of diversity and their determinants in the freshwater realm remains limited. Here, we characterized the geographical gradients, hotspots and spatial congruence of three facets of freshwater molluscan diversity and evaluated the relative importance of three different underlying mechanisms related to the energy, area/environmental heterogeneity and dispersal/historical hypotheses. Location: China. Methods: Species richness (SR), functional richness (FR) and taxonomic distinctness (TD, a proxy of phylogenetic diversity) were calculated for 212 drainage basins with a total of 313 molluscan species. Spatial congruence between the diversity facets was evaluated with Pearson correlation coefficient and overlap among hotspots. Multiple linear regression models and variation partitioning were used to assess the relative importance of different mechanisms. Results: Hotspots of SR and FR were mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River and Huai River basins, while high TD values were patchily distributed across China. We found extremely low spatial congruence between TD and both SR and FR, while there was relatively high concordance between SR and FR. All diversity facets were best explained by the dispersal/historical hypothesis with strong unique effects, followed by the factors related to the energy hypothesis. The area/ environmental heterogeneity hypothesis was only weakly supported. Main conclusions: We found a potentially strong influence of dispersal limitation and evolutionary history on the geographical diversity gradients of Chinese molluscs. This finding contrasts with the general finding that energy-related factors are the strongest correlates of diversity patterns at large spatial scales. Moreover, our results do not support the idea that using any one diversity component as a surrogate of the others in developing conservation strategies. Instead, an integrative approach embracing multiple facets of diversity should be adopted in the conservation of freshwater biodiversity.