Spatiotemporal dimensions of community assembly

Abstract

Ecological communities are assembled through a series of multiple processes, including dispersal, abiotic and biotic filtering, and ecological drift. Although these assembly processes act in concert to structure local communities, their relative importance is considerably variable among study systems. While such contingency of community assembly has been widely appreciated, the empirical and theoretical evidence is scattered around in the literature, and few efforts have been made to synthesize it. In this mini‐review, we summarize the accumulated evidence of the context‐dependency of community assembly rules, to reach a rough generalization of the contingency. Specifically, we argue that spatial and temporal dimensions can serve as general axes that regulate the relative importance of assembly processes. To this end, we synthesize the current understanding of how the relative importance of multiple assembly processes changes with spatial scales and complexity, and with time in the long and short terms. This review concludes that spatial and temporal dimensions can be common currencies of community assembly rules that are shared across various systems.

Connectivity and short‐term flood interactively affect fish community composition in drainage ditches of paddy fields in an agricultural landscape

“…The present results emphasize that the short‐term dynamics of community assembly, previously identified as needing further research (Shinohara et al, 2023), can be strongly influenced by fluctuations in temporal connectivity over very short periods of time. The transient changes in connectivity caused by the short‐term flash flood induced temporal shifts in community assembly rules, albeit partly concealed by the artificial flood associated with agricultural water management.…”

Testing the hierarchy of predictability in grassland restoration across a gradient of environmental severity

“…The potential importance of dominant and rare species in our predictability results might also be related to the continental extent of our study, which spans different vegetation types and a wide environmental gradient. The relative importance of niche‐based versus stochastic assembly processes is scale dependent, with the former usually being stronger when studied across larger spatial extents (Shinohara et al, 2023; Viana & Chase, 2019). It is thus possible that the higher predictability of indicators responsive to the dominant species is related to a stronger signal of niche‐based mechanisms when comparing communities across a regional scale.…”

Passive acoustic monitoring provides a fresh perspective on fundamental ecological questions

“…Along with temporal resolution, a major bottleneck to testing fundamental ecological questions in real-world settings has been the difficulty of sampling diverse animals at sufficient spatial resolution. The spatial scale of observation can influence the strength or form of many, perhaps most, modern-day ecological relationships, such as those concerning biodiversity change (Chase et al, 2018), community assembly (Shinohara et al, 2022), ecosystem functioning (Gonzalez et al, 2020) or ecological stability (Ross, Suzuki, et al, 2021). Distributed networks of PAM devices allow sampling across large spatial extents (Sethi et al, 2018), with potential for revealing spatial patterns and processes as envisioned by the discipline of soundscape ecology (Pijanowski, Villanueva-Rivera, et al, 2011).…”