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- Guzman, Laura Melissa, et al.
(författare)
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Accounting for temporal change in multiple biodiversity patterns improves the inference of metacommunity processes
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecology. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0012-9658 .- 1939-9170. ; 103:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In metacommunity ecology, a major focus has been on combining observational and analytical approaches to identify the role of critical assembly processes, such as dispersal limitation and environmental filtering, but this work has largely ignored temporal community dynamics. Here, we develop a "virtual ecologist" approach to evaluate assembly processes by simulating metacommunities varying in three main processes: density-independent responses to abiotic conditions, density-dependent biotic interactions, and dispersal. We then calculate a number of commonly used summary statistics of community structure in space and time and use random forests to evaluate their utility for inferring the strength of these three processes. We find that (i) both spatial and temporal data are necessary to disentangle metacommunity processes based on the summary statistics we test, and including statistics that are measured through time increases the explanatory power of random forests by up to 59% compared to cases where only spatial variation is considered; (ii) the three studied processes can be distinguished with different descriptors; and (iii) each summary statistic is differently sensitive to temporal and spatial sampling effort. Including repeated observations of metacommunities over time was essential for inferring the metacommunity processes, particularly dispersal. Some of the most useful statistics include the coefficient of variation of species abundances through time and metrics that incorporate variation in the relative abundances (evenness) of species. We conclude that a combination of methods and summary statistics is probably necessary to understand the processes that underlie metacommunity assembly through space and time, but we recognize that these results will be modified when other processes or summary statistics are used.
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| 2. |
- Jeliazkov, Alienor, et al.
(författare)
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A global database for metacommunity ecology, integrating species, traits, environment and space
- 2020
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Ingår i: Scientific Data. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2052-4463. ; 7:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The use of functional information in the form of species traits plays an important role in explaining biodiversity patterns and responses to environmental changes. Although relationships between species composition, their traits, and the environment have been extensively studied on a case-by-case basis, results are variable, and it remains unclear how generalizable these relationships are across ecosystems, taxa and spatial scales. To address this gap, we collated 80 datasets from trait-based studies into a global database for metaCommunity Ecology: Species, Traits, Environment and Space; “CESTES”. Each dataset includes four matrices: species community abundances or presences/absences across multiple sites, species trait information, environmental variables and spatial coordinates of the sampling sites. The CESTES database is a live database: it will be maintained and expanded in the future as new datasets become available. By its harmonized structure, and the diversity of ecosystem types, taxonomic groups, and spatial scales it covers, the CESTES database provides an important opportunity for synthetic trait-based research in community ecology. © 2020, The Author(s).
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