Effects of environmental and spatial variables on lotic ostracod metacommunity structure in the Iberian Peninsula

Environment and Space Rule, but Time Also Matters for the Organization of Tropical Pond Metacommunities

“…Under the metacommunity framework, freshwater ecosystems are particularly interesting due to their isolation in relation to the terrestrial landscape. Rivers, lakes and ponds have largely been studied in order to understand the role of dispersal limitation and species sorting in such isolated communities (e.g., Soininen et al, 2007;Escrivà et al, 2015;López-Delgado et al, 2019). Pond metacommunities show a high degree of randomness (Chase, 2007), although strong environmental effects are also frequently observed (Leibold and Chase, 2018).…”

Environmental factors and river network position allow prediction of benthic community assemblies: A model of nematode metacommunities

“…Metacommunities of river networks have been studied frequently with regard to a wide range of organismal groups, from bacteria to fishes. By contrast, within the broadly diverse and highly abundant meiobenthos, only ostracods have been studied in this context 13,14 . Since, among aquatic animals, the meiobenthos are of intermediate size (most are 1–2 mm long) and mobility (benthic, passive dispersers), they are useful in studies of the role of dispersal capacity in metacommunity processes.…”

“…As ostracods are so far the only meiobenthic organisms in streams to have been studied within the metacommunity context, we base our expectations on the results of those two studies 13,14 . Both showed that spatial and environmental variables were related to the ostracod metacommunity whereby spatial factors, especially watercourse distances, dominated.…”

Meiofauna as a model to test paradigms of ecological metacommunity theory

“…Our overview showed that freshwater meiofauna has been so far underrepresented in metacommunity studies. All the relevant studies (19) were observational and produced by the efforts of only a few research teams in few sampling areas (Matsuda et al, 2015; as well Escrivà et al, 2015;Castillo-Escrivà et al, 2016b, 2017ade Campos et al, 2018 were sampled in the same areas), thus the knowledge on metacommunity processes in meiofauna remains only fragmentary. The vast majority of the metacommunity studies focused on ostracods, and only a small number on rotifers and nematodes (Table 2), whereas other meiofaunal taxa, such as tardigrades, water mites, and harpacticoids, have been completely neglected.…”

“…In our review, 16 studies analyzed the effect of space on meiofauna, using different ways: (i) by comparing metacommunity patterns between several spatial scales (Fontaneto et al, 2005;Matsuda et al, 2015;Dümmer et al, 2016), (ii) by testing the influence of geographical distances and the non-/linear effects of latitude and longitude (Fontaneto et al, 2011), and (iii) by testing the effect of nonlinear spatial variables modeled according to the geographical distances between sites (Escrivà et al, 2015;Zhai et al, 2015b;Michelson et al, 2016;Castillo-Escrivà et al, 2016a, b, 2017aRosati et al, 2017;de Campos et al, 2018). Most of the studies reported dispersal limitations (Escrivà et al, 2015;Zhai et al, 2015b;Castillo-Escrivà et al, 2016b, 2017aRosati et al 2017;de Campos et al, 2018), fewer dispersal sufficiency Fontaneto et al, 2011;Matsuda et al, 2015;Michelson et al, 2016;de Campos et al, 2018), and in one a significant spatial structure was attributed to a dispersal surplus (Castillo-Escrivà et al, 2016a). The different results may reflect actual differences in the realized dispersal of the studied taxa within the particular metacommunities, i.e., the metacommunity context (Fig.…”