Species–environment sorting explains latitudinal patterns in spatiotemporal β‐diversity for freshwater macroinvertebrates

Abstract

Understanding how and why β‐diversity varies along latitude is a long‐standing challenge in community ecology and rarely addressed in both space and time. We aimed to explore the spatiotemporal variations in macroinvertebrate β‐diversity and their underlying drivers in eight biogeographic regions covering a substantial latitudinal gradient of more than 40 degrees. By combining β‐diversity partitioning and distance decay of community similarity analyses, we found that subtropical β‐diversity varies more in space relative to variation in time compared with temperate β‐diversity, as we predicted. This is probably because subtropical β‐diversity is shaped by species–environment sorting (SS), caused by habitat heterogeneity and species specialization, more strongly in space relative to time than temperate β‐diversity. Our study highlights the importance of SS in shaping latitudinal gradients of β‐diversity in space and time.