On the variability of Species Abundance Distributions with trophic guild and community structure

Abstract Species Abundance Distributions (SADs) are one of the most studied properties of ecological communities, and their variability has been studied mostly in the context of horizontal communities, i.e. sets of species from a particular trophic guild. However, virtually all ecological communities encompass several trophic guilds, and the trophic interactions between them are key for explaining the persistence and abundance of individual species. Here I ask whether trophic interactions are also important in shaping Species Abundance Distributions of the different guilds of a community. I analyze the variation in SAD shape across trophic guilds in model and empirical communities. For that, I use a theoretical model that allows tracking the variations in abundances across trophic levels. The relationship between SAD shape and (1) trophic level, and (2) degree of predator specialization is analyzed using mixed-effect models. I combine this approach with an analysis of 4676 empirical datasets spanning terrestrial, marine and freshwater habitats, for which the variation in SAD shape is related to (1) trophic guild, and (2) habitat type. The evenness of model SADs is positively correlated to the trophic level of the guild considered, and also to the number of prey species per predator. These findings are confirmed by the empirical data: there is a significant relationship between SAD evenness and trophic guild, whereby primary producers display the most uneven SADs and pure carnivores the most even ones. Furthermore, regardless of trophic guild, SADs from marine habitats are the most even ones, with terrestrial SADs being the most uneven.