Relative importance of environmental, geographic, and spatial variables on zooplankton metacommunities

Dallas, Tad; Drake, John M.

doi:10.1890/es14-00071.1

Cited by 28 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(62 reference statements)

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“…Clementsian assemblage structure has been found in plants (Meynard et al, 2013;Willig et al, 2011), mammals (López-González, Presley, Lozano, Stevens, & Higgins, 2012, and various freshwater organisms, including plankton, macroinvertebrates, and fish (Dallas & Drake, 2014;Erős et al, 2017;Fernandes, Henriques-Silva, Penha, Zuanon, & Peres-Neto, 2014;Tonkin, Stoll, Jähnig, & Haase, 2016;Torres & Higgins, 2016). Clementsian assemblage structure has been found in plants (Meynard et al, 2013;Willig et al, 2011), mammals (López-González, Presley, Lozano, Stevens, & Higgins, 2012, and various freshwater organisms, including plankton, macroinvertebrates, and fish (Dallas & Drake, 2014;Erős et al, 2017;Fernandes, Henriques-Silva, Penha, Zuanon, & Peres-Neto, 2014;Tonkin, Stoll, Jähnig, & Haase, 2016;Torres & Higgins, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do metacommunity theories explain spatial variation in fish assemblage structure in a pristine tropical river?

2018

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Understanding processes driving patterns of species distribution and diversity is one of the main objectives of community ecology. There has been a growing recognition that local environmental conditions are not the only factor structuring ecological communities, and that large‐scale spatial variation and dispersal also have major influences. The aim of our study was to evaluate spatial variation in fish assemblage structure along the longitudinal fluvial gradient of the Bita River, a nearly pristine tributary of the Orinoco River in the Llanos region of Colombia. Standardised surveys conducted at 34 sites throughout the basin during the low water period in January and March 2016 yielded 25,928 fish specimens representing 201 species. Twenty‐seven environmental variables were recorded at each site, and asymmetric eigenvector maps were used to model spatial variables. To understand spatial variation in local fish assemblages and their relationships with the environmental and spatial variables, two approaches were used. First, we applied the elements of metacommunity structure framework, followed by a variation decomposition analysis that allowed the metacommunity to be classified according to six alternative patterns of species distribution and four alternative metacommunity paradigms. We hypothesised that at a basin scale a major fraction of variation in structure is explained by a pure environmental effect and metacommunity patterns should reveal a Clementsian distribution. At a more regional scale (localities within a river section), assemblages in upstream and downstream regions may reflect different metacommunity processes. Because headwater streams are isolated within the river network, they should receive fewer migrants and may have local assemblages strongly influenced by local environmental conditions and species sorting with one of three possible distributional patterns (Clementsian, Gleasonian, or evenly spaced) would be observed. Conversely, downstream sites closer to the river mouth should be influenced by high dispersal, resulting in a greater importance of spatial factors and the mass effect, with metacommunity patterns nested along the longitudinal gradient. Our results suggest that the fish metacommunity in the Bita River exhibits a Clementsian distribution, implying that species respond to the environmental and fluvial gradient as groups along the longitudinal gradient. These replacements were associated with environmental heterogeneity, especially regarding habitat features. Similarly, the variation partitioning analysis showed that the pure environmental component was higher than the pure spatial component, which is consistent with species sorting. In this paper, we demonstrated that variation partitioning and metacommunity structure analyses provided complementary findings to infer processes structuring fish assemblages in the Bita River. Both approaches identified species sorting as the principal structuring processes in this system. Therefore, strategies to preserve fish diversity...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do metacommunity theories explain spatial variation in fish assemblage structure in a pristine tropical river?

2018

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“…The first axis of correspondence analysis may strongly represent a dominant underlying species composition gradient when applied to community data (McCune & Grace, 2002;Presley, Higgins & Willig, 2010;Dallas & Drake, 2014). we modelled total and resident dragonfly and damselfly communities in response to the local and landscape environmental variables.…”

Section: Environmental Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…we modelled total and resident dragonfly and damselfly communities in response to the local and landscape environmental variables. As is standard practice, singleton species were removed prior to the ordination because they exaggerate the distinctiveness of sites (McCune & Grace, 2002;Dallas & Drake, 2014). We used the first axis of a correspondence analysis of the community data as the response variable for each scenario, that is, total and resident species occurrence of dragonflies and damselflies in each location (eight scenarios altogether).…”

Section: Environmental Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species residency status affects model selection and hypothesis testing in freshwater community ecology

et al. 2016

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Summary Species occurrences have multiple ecological states that may strongly influence community analysis and inference. This may be especially true in freshwater systems where many animals have complex life cycles with adult dispersal and juvenile resident stages. The effects of ecological state variation on standard empirical approaches are largely unknown. Here, we analysed the effects of natal resident versus non‐natal immigrant species occurrence on community‐level environmental gradient modelling and spatial–environmental hypothesis testing using adult dragonflies and damselflies as model taxa. Resident and total (resident + immigrant) occurrences of these taxa responded to different sets of environmental variables and resident occurrences reduced model selection uncertainty in 75% of test cases. Effects of environmental gradients, spatial gradients or both were observed in residents but not immigrants, and supported predictions of dispersal limitation and niche‐based species sorting often implicated for structuring freshwater communities. These results indicate that resident‐only analysis of the dispersal stage should improve multi‐model inference and detection of spatial–environmental effects in freshwater community ecology. The species resident–immigrant dichotomy neglects population dynamics and individual variation yet apparently marks an ecologically significant boundary that scales up to influence community‐level occurrence patterns.

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“…Conversely, similar to that introduced by Diamond (1975), a metacommunity is considered to have a checkerboard 220 distribution if there are significantly more embedded absences than expected by chance (negative coherence). Finally, a metacommunity is considered to have a random distribution if the number of embedded absences does not differ from null (but see Dallas and Drake (2014) for concerns about interpreting random and Gleasonian patterns). Rather than representing random species occurrence within a metacommunity, random species range distributions more 225 realistically suggests species distributions and environmental drivers are independent of each other.…”

Section: Statistical Analyses Elements Of Metacommunity Structure (Ems)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importantly, Dallas and Drake (2014) argued against the assumption of non-significant coherence representing randomly-structured metacommunities. They reason that doing so is to mistakenly assert the null hypothesis and that an inability to distinguish between positive 335 and negative coherence does not necessarily indicate random assembly.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Supplemental Information 1: Table S1

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The Elements of Metacommunity Structure (EMS) framework gives rise to important ecological insights through the distinction of metacommunities into several different idealised structures. We examined the EMS in assemblages occupying a low-mountain river system in central Germany, sampled over three consecutive years. We compared the idealised distributions of assemblages in both the riparian floodplain zone (carabid beetles and spiders) and the benthic instream environment (benthic invertebrates). We further grouped instream organisms into taxonomic and trait groups to examine whether greater competition signal emerges in more similar species groups. We found little evidence of strong competition, even for trait-modality groups, and nestedness was almost non-existent. In addition to random distributions, Gleasonian distributions (indicating clear, but individualistic turnover between sites) were the most commonly identified structure. Clear differences were apparent between different trait groups, particularly between within-trait modalities. These were most evident for different dispersal modes and life cycle durations, with strong dispersers showing possible signs of mass effects. While random distributions may have partly reflected small sample sizes, clearly coherent patterns were evident for many groups, indicating a sufficient gradient in environmental conditions. The prevalence of random distributions suggests many species are responding to a variety of environmental filters in these river-floodplain metacommunities in an anthropogenically-dominated landscape, whereas Gleasonian distributions indicate species are responding idiosyncratically to a primary environmental gradient. Our findings further emphasise the prevalence of context dependency (spatio-temporal variability) in metacommunity studies and emphasise the need to further disentangle the causes of such variation.

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Relative importance of environmental, geographic, and spatial variables on zooplankton metacommunities

Cited by 28 publications

References 49 publications

Do metacommunity theories explain spatial variation in fish assemblage structure in a pristine tropical river?

Do metacommunity theories explain spatial variation in fish assemblage structure in a pristine tropical river?

Species residency status affects model selection and hypothesis testing in freshwater community ecology

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