Historical contingency via priority effects counteracts environmental change on metacommunity dynamics across decades

Jorge García‐Girón,Jani Heino,Heikki Toivonen,Marja Lindholm,Janne Alahuhta

doi:10.1002/lno.11699

Jorge García‐Girón, Jani Heino + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.11699

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Abstract

AbstractCommunity ecology has had a strong focus on single snapshots of species compositional variation in time. However, environmental change often occurs slowly at relatively broad spatio‐temporal scales, which requires historically explicit assessments of long‐term metacommunity dynamics, such as the order of species arrival during community assembly (i.e., priority effects), a theme that merits further empirical quantification. In this study, we applied the Bayesian inference scheme of Hierarchical Modeling of Species Communities together with information on functional traits and evolutionary dependencies to efficiently explore the question of how ecological communities are organized in space and time. To do this, we used a comprehensive time‐series dataset from boreal lake plants and adopted the perspective that more sound conclusions on metacommunity dynamics can be gained from studies that consider a historically integrative approach over long timeframes. Our findings revealed that historical contingency via priority effects can profoundly shape community assembly under the influence of environmental change across decades (here, from the 1940s to the 2010s). Similarly, our results supported the existence of both positive and negative species‐to‐species associations in lake plants, suggesting that functional divergence can switch the inhibition–facilitation balance at the metacommunity level. Perhaps more importantly, this proof‐of‐concept study supports the notion that community ecology should include a historical perspective and suggests that ignoring priority effects may risk our ability to identify the true magnitude of change in present‐day biotic communities.

Highlights

Special Issue: Nonlinear Dynamics, Resilience, and Regime Shifts in Aquatic Communities & Ecosystems [Correction added on 09 March 2021, after first online publication: the figure legend of Figure S1 was reworded to avoid duplicating information contained in an original source, which has been properly quoted and cited.]
García-Girón et al Priority effects in metacommunities discussed by Brown et al (2017), empirical research in metacommunity ecology has primarily focused on analyzing single snapshot observations of compositional variation, thereby jeopardizing attempts to resolve the historical contingencies that are not evident from such static views of community organization (Datry et al 2015). [Correction added on 09 March 2021, after first online publication: the previous two sentences were reworded to avoid duplicating information contained in an original source, which has been properly cited.] These issues beg for a shifting paradigm in the types of questions we ask in community ecology
Discussing around the state of ecological research before the end of the century, Lawton (1999) stated that “community ecology (...) is a mess”, not least because this discipline is riddled with contingency so challenging that “useful generalizations are hard to find” (Fukami 2015). [Correction added on 09 March 2021, after first online publication: this sentence was reworded to avoid duplicating information contained in an original source, which has been properly cited.] Basically, according to Fukami (2015), this is to say that long-lasting ecological imprints on contemporary communities can often be understood only by considering the legacies of the past, whether due to biotic or abiotic factors (Drake 1991)

Summary

Introduction

[Correction added on 09 March 2021, after first online publication: the previous two sentences were reworded to avoid duplicating information contained in an original source, which has been properly cited.] the study of community assembly history offers a means to a deeper understanding of ecological patterns by decoding how inhibition and facilitation interacts with environmental change to divert communities onto alternative trajectories (De Meester et al 2016), historical contingency via priority effects is usually absent from the traditional archetypes of community assembly (reviewed in Logue et al 2011), and has remained a fairly minor topic for the literature to date. If ecological theory holds true, incumbent species could preempt niche space at the expense of late-successional species (Chase 2003), these and other priority effects (e.g., niche modification, see Table 1) may still be difficult to predict unambiguously (Little and Altermatt 2018)

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