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15 results for “Metacommunity dynamics”
McMurdo Dry Valleys Metacommunity dynamics simulations for diatoms in Antarctic ponds
We use metacommunity simulations to understand how local and regional community assembly dynamics influence the regional biodiversity patterns that we observe in the McMurdo Dry Valleys ecosystem. A metacommunity refers to a network of communities in an ecosystem that are connected to one another by the dispersal of biota among sites. For example, ponds in the McMurdo Dry Valleys share common diatom species that are likely dispersed among neighboring ponds by wind. We have written a metacommunity model for the R programming language (MCSim, Sokol et al. 2015) to explore what biodiversity patterns look like for different metacommunity connectivity scenarios. This gives us the opportunity to model alternative hypotheses and explore how biodiversity metrics, such as beta-diversity, can be expected to respond to changing ecosystem connectivity for different sets of assumptions about the underlying dynamics that could potentially control biodiversity in the Dry Valleys.Â
Community metabarcoding reveals the relative role of environmental filtering and spatial processes in metacommunity dynamics of soil microarthropods across a mosaic of montane forests
<p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>Disentangling the relative role of environmental filtering and spatial processes in driving metacommunity structure across mountainous regions remains challenging, as the way we quantify spatial connectivity in topographically and environmentally heterogeneous landscapes can influence our perception of which process predominates. More empirical datasets are required to account for taxon- and context-dependency but relevant research in understudied areas is often compromised by the taxonomic impediment<span><span>. </span></span>We here employed haplotype-level community DNA metabarcoding, enabled by stringent filtering of Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs), to characterize metacommunity structure of soil microarthropod assemblages across a mosaic of five forest habitats on the Troodos mountain range in Cyprus. We found similar β diversity patterns at ASV and species (OTU, Operational Taxonomic Unit) levels, which pointed to a primary role of habitat filtering resulting in the existence of largely distinct metacommunities linked to different forest types. Within-habitat turnover was correlated to topoclimatic heterogeneity, again emphasizing the role of environmental filtering. However, when integrating landscape matrix information for the highly fragmented <i>Quercus alnifolia</i> habitat, we also detected a major role of spatial isolation determined by patch connectivity, indicating that stochastic and niche-based processes synergistically govern community assembly. Alpha diversity patterns varied between ASV and OTU levels, with OTU richness decreasing with elevation and ASV richness following a longitudinal gradient, potentially reflecting a decline of genetic diversity eastwards due to historical pressures. Our study demonstrates the utility of haplotype-level community metabarcoding for characterising metacommunity structure of complex assemblages and improving our understanding of biodiversity dynamics across mountainous landscapes worldwide.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
A patch-dynamic metacommunity perspective on the persistence of mutualistic and antagonistic bipartite networks
<p>The structure of interactions between species within a community plays a key role in maintaining biodiversity. Previous studies have found that the effects of these structures might substantially differ depending on interaction type, for example, a highly connected and nested architecture stabilizes mutualistic communities, while the stability of antagonistic communities is enhanced in modular and weakly connected structures. Here we show that, when network dynamics are modelled using a patch-dynamic metacommunity framework, the qualitative differences between antagonistic and mutualistic systems disappear, with nestedness and modularity interacting to promote metacommunity persistence. However, the interactive effects are significantly weaker in antagonistic metacommunities. Our model also predicts an increase in connectance, nestedness and modularity over time in both types of interaction, except in antagonistic networks where nestedness declines. At steady state, we find a strong negative correlation between nestedness and modularity in both mutualistic and antagonistic metacommunities. These predictions are consistent with the structural trends found in a large dataset of real-world antagonistic and mutualistic communities.</p>
Disease hotspots or hot species? Infection dynamics in multi-host metacommunities controlled by species identity, not source location
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Data from: Complex temporal dynamics of insect metacommunities along a tropical elevational gradient
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A patch-dynamic metacommunity perspective on the persistence of mutualistic and antagonistic bipartite networks
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Community metabarcoding reveals the relative role of environmental filtering and spatial processes in metacommunity dynamics of soil microarthropods across a mosaic of montane forests
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Drivers of metacommunity dynamics in river-floodplain fish: A path modeling approach
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Data from: Mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in urban green spaces: implications for urban wildlife conservation
<p>As urban growth expands and natural environments fragment, it is essential to understand the ecological roles fulfilled by urban green spaces. To evaluate how urban green spaces function as wildlife habitat, we estimated mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in city parks, cemeteries, golf courses, and natural areas throughout the greater Chicago, IL, USA region. We found similar a-diversity (with the exception of city parks), but remarkably dissimilar communities in different urban green spaces. Additionally, the type of urban green space greatly influenced species colonization and persistence rates. For example, coyotes (Canis latrans) had the highest, but white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) the lowest, probability of persistence in golf courses compared to other green space types. Further, most species had a difficult time colonizing city parks even when sites were seemingly available. Our results indicate that urban green spaces contribute different, but collectively important, habitats for maintaining and conserving biodiversity in cities.</p>
Data from: Species turnover through time: colonization and extinction dynamics across metacommunities
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Data from: Mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in urban green spaces: implications for urban wildlife conservation
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Data from: Dispersal promotes compensatory dynamics and stability in forced metacommunities
Understanding the factors that govern the stability of populations and communities has gained increasing importance as habitat fragmentation and environmental perturbations continue to escalate due to human activities. Dispersal is commonly viewed as essential to the maintenance of diversity in spatially subdivided communities, but few experiments have explored how dispersal interacts with the spatiotemporal components of environmental perturbations to determine community-level stability. We examined these processes using an experimental planktonic system composed of three competing species of zooplankton. We subjected zooplankton metacommunities to varying levels of dispersal and pH perturbations that varied in their degree of spatial synchrony. We show that dispersal can reverse the destabilizing effects of environmental forcing when perturbations are spatially asynchronous. Asynchrony in pH perturbations generated spatially and temporally varying species refugia that promoted source-sink dynamics and allowed prolonged persistence of zooplankton species that were otherwise extirpated in synchronously varying metacommunities. This, in turn, increased local species diversity, promoted compensatory population dynamics and enhanced local community-level stability. Our results indicate that patterns of spatial covariation in environmental variability are critical to predicting the effects of dispersal on the dynamics and persistence of communities.
Data from: Eco-evolutionary dynamics in metacommunities: ecological inheritance, helping within species, and harming between species
Understanding selection on intra- and inter-specific interactions that take place in dispersal-limited communities is a challenge for ecology and evolutionary biology. The problem is that local demographic stochasticity generates eco-evolutionary dynamics that are generally too complicated to make tractable analytical investigations. Here, we circumvent this problem by approximating the selection gradient on a quantitative trait that influences local community dynamics, assuming that such dynamics are deterministic with a stable fixed point. We nonetheless incorporate unavoidable kin selection effects arising from demographic stochasticity. Our approximation reveals that selection depends on how an individual expressing a trait-change influences: (1) its own fitness and the fitness of its current relatives; and (2) the fitness of its downstream relatives through modifications of local ecological conditions (i.e., through ecological inheritance). Mathematically, the effects of ecological inheritance on selection are captured by dispersal-limited versions of press-perturbations of community ecology. We use our approximation to investigate the evolution of helping within- and harming between-species when these behaviours influence demography. We find that altruistic helping evolves more readily when intra-specific competition is for material resources rather than for space because in this case, the costs of kin competition tend to paid by downstream relatives. Similarly, altruistic harming between species evolves when it alleviates downstream relatives from inter-specific competition. Beyond these examples, our approximation can help better understand the influence of ecological inheritance on a variety of eco-evolutionary dynamics in metacommunities, from consumer-resource and predator-prey coevolution to selection on mating systems with demographic feedbacks.
Data from: Dispersal promotes compensatory dynamics and stability in forced metacommunities
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Data from: Eco-evolutionary dynamics in metacommunities: ecological inheritance, helping within species, and harming between species
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Allen Brain Atlas
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Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
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