Metacommunity resilience against simulated gradients of wildfire: disturbance intensity and species dispersal ability determine landscape recover capacity

Abstract

Disturbances, such as wildfires, are one of the main drivers of biodiversity dynamics, and their frequency and intensity are expected to increase due to global change. Such disturbances generate a mosaic of affected and unaffected patches that change landscape structure and, consequently, metacommunity networks. Therefore, to fully understand the consequences of such disturbances, a landscape perspective is required. In 2012, a wildfire burned 13 000 hectares in the NE Iberian Peninsula affecting a pond macroinvertebrate metacommunity. Communities were highly resilient to this disturbance, recovering after one hydroperiod. Their resilience was related to dispersal, being lower in species with weak dispersal abilities than those with strong dispersal abilities. This suggested that the metacommunity network played a major role in defining system resilience. In this context, we introduced a theoretical analysis based on this network in which we evaluated metacommunity resilience across several gradients of disturbance size and intensity incorporating species dispersal ability. Our study supports the empirical observation of a highly resilient metacommunity but also reveals that increased disturbance regimes might lead to a collapse of this resilience. Disturbance size and intensity interacted to determine the community recovery rate, which was high when both variables were low. Nevertheless, the transition from high to low resilience was sharp and depended on species dispersal. Diversity recovery was mostly driven by disturbance intensity, abruptly collapsing with its rise. This response highlighted the qualitative difference in the effect of size and intensity. These results not only illustrate the mechanisms shaping the studied metacommunity but also more generally stress the strong role of metacommunity mechanisms and landscape structure in biodiversity resilience. Finally, this study highlights the importance of using theoretical approaches rooted in empirical data to determine metacommunity dynamics and the need to preserve and build connected and heterogeneous landscapes to address future disturbance scenarios.

Disturbance‐driven alteration of patch connectivity determines local biodiversity recovery within metacommunities

“…Predicting how ecological communities may respond to the increased intensities and frequencies of disturbances associated with climate change is particularly challenging, since the different characteristics of disturbance events (duration, intensity, frequency, spatial extent and spatial location) are known to have different impacts on community recovery and species richness (Jacquet and Altermatt 2020, Jacquet et al 2020). For instance, Cunillera‐Montcusí et al (2021) demonstrated that wildfire size and spatial extent have qualitatively different impacts on the recovery of macroinvertebrate communities in freshwater ponds. Similarly, we found that increasing drying spatial extent decreased average community recovery, while drying duration had a smaller effect, echoing some recent empirical findings (Crabot et al 2021).…”

“…Ecologically scaled landscape indices incorporate the dispersal ability of an organism into the computation of landscape connectivity (Vos et al 2001). They have been shown to have better abilities to predict metacommunity patterns (Laroche et al 2020) and dynamics (Lalechère et al 2017, Cunillera‐Montcusi et al 2021), and they are considered pivotal for designing efficient landscape conservation strategies (Meurant et al 2018). A step forward is to incorporate the additional role played by disturbances in shaping landscape connectivity to gain a general understanding of biodiversity recovery in spatially structured landscapes.…”

Feedback between climate change and eutrophication: revisiting the allied attack concept and how to strike back

“…The monitoring and restoration of lake biodiversity and ecosystem services should also consider that besides the individual responses of a given lake or pond, a high degree of dynamism occurs at local, regional, and global spatial scales (Heino et al 2021). Connected and heterogeneous landscapes allow metacommunity dynamics to build biodiversity resilience against future disturbances driven by climate change, such as fires (Cunillera-Montcusí et al 2021).…”

Climate-Driven Legacies in Simulated Microbial Communities Alter Litter Decomposition Rates

“…Forcing uncertainty does not appear to be a major issue because of the similarity in simulations between the two forcing scenarios (Figure 2 and Supplementary Figure 5). However, uncertainty remains in the simulated community traits due to missing processes such as fungibacteria interactions (e.g., Wright and Vetsigian, 2016), realistic dispersal (e.g., Cunillera-Montcusí et al, 2021), and evolution. Notably, a recent study across the Glassman et al (2018) climate gradient found fast bacterial evolution in addition to ecological adaptation (Chase et al, 2021).…”