Assessing metacommunity processes through signatures in spatiotemporal turnover of community composition
- 21 June 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in Ecology Letters
- Vol. 23 (9), 1330-1339
- https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13523
Abstract
Although metacommunity ecology has been a major field of research in the last decades, with both conceptual and empirical outputs, the analysis of the temporal dynamics of metacommunities has only emerged recently and consists mostly of repeated static analyses. Here we propose a novel analytical framework to assess metacommunity processes using path analyses of spatial and temporal diversity turnovers. We detail the principles and practical aspects of this framework and apply it to simulated datasets to illustrate its ability to decipher the respective contributions of entangled drivers of metacommunity dynamics. We then apply it to four empirical datasets. Empirical results support the view that metacommunity dynamics may be generally shaped by multiple ecological processes acting in concert, with environmental filtering being variable across both space and time. These results reinforce our call to go beyond static analyses of metacommunities that are blind to the temporal part of environmental variability.Keywords
Funding Information
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (16‐IDEX‐0001 (CAP 20‐25), ANR‐10‐LABX‐41, ANR‐14‐CE02‐0012, ANR‐17‐CE32‐0011)
This publication has 59 references indexed in Scilit:
- Predictive systems ecologyProceedings. Biological sciences, 2013
- Empirical approaches to metacommunities: a review and comparison with theoryTrends in Ecology & Evolution, 2011
- Temporal turnover and the maintenance of diversity in ecological assemblagesPhilosophical Transactions B, 2010
- Integrating spatial and temporal approaches to understanding species richnessPhilosophical Transactions B, 2010
- Partitioning variation in ecological communities: do the numbers add up?Journal of Applied Ecology, 2010
- A stochastic dispersal-limited trait-based model of community dynamicsJournal of Theoretical Biology, 2010
- Dynamical evolution of ecosystemsNature, 2006
- Interpreting the Results from Multiple Regression and Structural Equation ModelsBulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 2005
- Integrating environmental and spatial processes in ecological community dynamicsEcology Letters, 2005
- The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecologyEcology Letters, 2004