Abstract
The study of how long-term changes affect metacommunities is a relevant topic, that involves the evaluation of connections among biological assemblages across different spatio-temporal scales, in order to fully understand links between global changes and macroevolutionary patterns. We applied multivariate statistical analyses and diversity tests using a large data matrix of rodent fossil sites in order to analyse long-term faunal changes. Late Miocene rodent faunas from southwestern Europe were classified into metacommunities, presumably sharing ecological affinities, which followed temporal and environmental non-random assembly and disassembly patterns. Metacommunity dynamics of these faunas were driven by environmental changes associated with temperature variability, but there was also some influence from the aridity shifts described for this region during the late Miocene. Additionally, while variations in the structure of rodent assemblages were directly influenced by global climatic changes in the southern province, the northern sites showed a pattern of climatic influence mediated by diversity-dependent processes.
Highlights
The traditional view of community ecology, where groups of species are temporally stable, closed and isolated from each other, has changed over the years[1,2,3,4]
Late Miocene rodent faunas from the Iberoccitanian region sharing similar ecological structures were classified into metacommunities, which followed non-random temporal and environmental assembly and disassembly patterns directly or indirectly related to environmental changes
Influence of climatic changes on the rodent communities proceeded through the integration of separate impacts on the different faunal components that integrated these assemblages
Summary
The traditional view of community ecology, where groups of species (communities) are temporally stable, closed and isolated from each other, has changed over the years[1,2,3,4]. The application of the metacommunity concept is key to study the macroecological and macroevolutionary processes behind the deep time dynamics of communities[6,7,8] and regional scale analyses allow us to evaluate macro-scale biotic and abiotic factors (faunal turnover, environmental change...) that affect them Within this metacommunity framework, the study of assembly-disassembly processes, in which successive species losses and gains are considered the reflection of habitat changes usually linked to global climatic change, has gained relevance in the last years[8,9,10]. Because of the relatively homogenous ecology of their species (mainly habitat preferences), these faunal components work as environmental proxies to interpret community ecological structure This macroecological fossil-based approach enables us to identify temporal and spatial variations of community structure, which presumably were related to changes in global and regional climate. Since there are significant environmental differences between the southern and northern provinces within the Iberoccitanian Region[16,34,35], we analysed community changes separately for each biogeographic province
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