Development of novel temporal beta-diversity indices for assessing community compositional shifts accounting for changes in the properties of individuals

Abstract

Aim: Revealing patterns of temporal biodiversity change is an urgent issue in light of the effects of global climate change. In addition, climate change is known to modify not only biodiversity but also individual life-history. Nevertheless, although the connection between individual physiology and large-scale ecological patterns is a major challenge for the mechanistic understanding of macroecology, large gaps exist between individual life-history and biodiversity. In this context, novel methods can be used to evaluate changes in individual properties and their effects on biodiversity. Innovation: Novel indices that can evaluate compositional shifts across time by explicitly considering the contributions of the life-histories (i.e., growth, mortality, and recruitment) of individuals in a community were successfully developed. By applying subset data of the Forest Inventory and Analysis database for the state of Rhode Island in the USA, changes in the contribution of individual life-histories to biodiversity change were successfully identified. Main conclusions: The development of the proposed novel indices not only represents methodological progress in community ecology and macroecology but also a conceptual advance, bridging studies of biodiversity and individual life-history and physiology. The individual-based diversity index opens the door to the possibility of individual-based biodiversity science, which could facilitate understanding the comprehensive effects of climate change across different hierarchies of biological organisation.

Spatiotemporal dimensions of community assembly

“…Although the persistence of individuals could be an essential factor in mediating the effect of abiotic filtering (Nakadai, 2020), few studies have explicitly incorporated this idea into an analytical framework. An interesting avenue of future research is to explore how individual persistence influences the importance of different assembly processes, such as abiotic and biotic filtering, dispersal, and ecological drift (Costa‐Pereira et al, 2022; Nakadai, 2021, 2022).…”

Higher-order dissimilarity in biodiversity: Identifying dissimilarities of spatial or temporal dissimilarity structures

“…For example, temporal changes in community composition (i.e. temporal beta diversity: Legendre 2019; Nakadai 2022) have recently been expanded to multiple sites at large spatial scales (Magurran et al 2019; Nakadai 2020; Gotelli et al 2022), thus necessitating quantitative evaluation of inter-site dissimilarity between temporal dynamics of community composition measured using pairwise comparison. Furthermore, loss and biotic homogenisation in species composition and intraspecific haplotypes have been studied in-depth since the identification of human-induced impacts on biodiversity within the context of conservation (Olden 2006; Valtonen et al 2017).…”