Aim: As we enter an era of major biodiversity shifts, understanding large-scale biodiversity patterns has become crucial for ecological and conservation purposes. Often, conservation priorities are based on concepts derived largely from species richness, yet recent works show that different facets of biodiversity are also critical for proper ecosystem continuity, function, and services. One facet of biodiversity increasingly relevant to conservation is functional diversity. Here, we aim to improve our understanding of large-scale patterns of biodiversity by testing the hypothesis that species richness can also accurately estimate functional diversity along the latitudinal gradient of species richness in fish.

Location: Marine Environments.

Time Period: Contemporary Major taxa studied: 842 species within eleven fish families; Acanthuridae, Blenniidae, Chaetodontidae, Gobiidae, Labridae, Lutjanidae, Pleuronectidae, Pomacanthidae, Pomacentridae, Scombridae, Sparidae.

Methods: Using geometric morphometrics to calculate morphological diversity, a proxy for functional diversity, we estimated expected functional diversity for a given number of species and compared it to the observed functional diversity in fish families along latitudes. We then fit a brokenstick regression model with estimates of functional diversity over absolute degree of latitudes to locate latitudes where significant shifts in functional diversity occur.

Results: We found that species richness typically over- or under-estimated functional diversity along the latitudinal gradient of species richness in the evaluated fishes. We also show that for most families investigated, there is a pattern of stable functional diversity from the equator through the tropics that shifts with a mean inflection point occurring at absolute latitude 31.7° ± 10.1°. We suggest this pattern may be linked to changes in environmental factors such as global temperature and/or habitat availability beyond tropical latitudes, however, these concepts require more study.

Main conclusion: This analysis shows the importance of further considering functional diversity in combination with other biodiversity metrics when developing conservation priorities and policies.

Data was collected in collaboration with the curators of Fishbase. Pictures of fish families were collated and provided as main files for the addition of landmarks via tpsDIG2w64 and tpsUtil64 software.

Patterns of functional diversity along latitudinal gradients of species richness in eleven fish families

This repository comprises the raw data relevant for entry into the scripts that generated the patterns for the manuscript titled: Patterns of functional diversity along latitudinal gradients of species richness in eleven fish families, authored by Jonathan Diamond and Denis Roy, in press with Global Ecology and Biogeography https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14668238.

You can download the raw data used for this research by clicking on the appropriate files. To process the files as we have for the manuscript, please see the scripts available at the following GitHub script repository:

https://github.com/denisroy1/Patterns-of-Functional-Diversity-in-Fishes

• Files listed as 'disdffamilyname.txt' correspond to family-specific estimates of functional diversity from the null model with 95% confidence intervals at each latitude.

• Files listed 'familyname.txt' represent actual family-level functional diversity estimates based on geometric morphometric variance.

• Files listed 'familyname.TPS' are landmark coordinates for all fish within each fish family.

• There is also a 'Readme.md' file which mirrors much of this information, but also includes details on which data is used in which scripts for analyses.