Fig 1.
Map of Slovenia with its four karst regions (from [31]) along with sampling sites.
Since the High Dinaric karst and the Low Dinaric karst are intercalated, are typically treated as a single unit. We treat it as a single unit here. Modified from Gams [33].
Table 1.
List of Slovenian caves sampled for epikarst copepods, number of drips, average number of samples taken, sampling start date, and karst region (defined in [33]).
Sampling was typically done at monthly intervals.
Table 2.
List of stygobiotic copepod species found in the 81 drips in 13 caves in Slovenia, along with the number of drips and caves each species was found in.
Table 3.
Epikarst copepod species richness in the 13 Slovenian study caves, ranked from highest to lowest species richness.
Mao-tau estimates and standard errors are for observed numbers of species and Chao1 estimates include the likelihood of additional species based on the frequency of singleton species. Total N is the total number of copepods collected. See Fig 1 for regions.
Table 4.
Distribution of the number of species in the 81 drips sampled, arranged according to the cave in which they occur.
Fig 2.
Histogram of the number of copepod species per drip scaled to the total number copepod species found in the cave where the drip is located.
Black bars are the Dinaric Karst, white bars the Isolated Karst, and gray bars the Alpine Karst. Velika pasica was not included because of much longer sampling times (Table 1).
Table 5.
Minimum, maximum, and mean number of stygobiotic copepod species (S) per drip (Sd), and total cave species richness.
Max Sd/S is the ratio of species numbers in the richest drip to the cave total; mean Sd/S is the ratio of mean species numbers in drips to the cave total. Βsor is Soresnson dissimilarity, and % turnover is the contribution of turnover to Sorenson dissimilarity [37].
Table 6.
Comparison of observed and estimated total epikarst copepod species richness for the Alpine karst, Isolated karst, and the Dinaric karst.
When the coefficient of variation for incidence based distribution is greater than 0.5, as it is in this case, Chao [37] recommends using classic rather than unbiased estimators for Chao2, and using the larger of Chao2 and ICE estimates. Both are shown below. Sorenson’s dissimilarity index is also shown, as is the percent contribution of turnover to this dissimilarity [36].
Fig 3.
Species accumulation curves for stygobiotic epikarst copepods in Slovenian caves.
Top panel: Asymptotic curves; Bottom panel: Non-asymptotic curves. Upper and lower curves are the 95 percent confidence intervals. Curves were created in EstimateS [18].
Fig 4.
Accumulation curves for epikarst copepod species in the Alpine (dotted line) and Dinaric (solid line) karst.
Since only two caves were sampled in the Isolated karst, it is not included.
Fig 5.
Relative contribution of within drip (α-diversity), among drip, among cave, and among region diversity (all β-diversity) to the overall diversity of 30 epikarst copepod species, relative to random expectation.