How Does the Landscape Affect Metacommunity Structure? A Quantitative Review for Lentic Environments

Abstract

We conducted a literature review to understand how landscape patterns affect ecological processes in metacommunities in lentic environments. Our aim was to identify trends in these studies considering taxa, aquatic systems, landscape metrics, and response variables. We also recorded whether studies were presenting the exclusive effect of landscape on metacommunities (i.e., the effect of landscape independent from other environmental variables). Finally, we provide some guidelines for future studies. We identified a consistent increase in the number of studies from 2006 to 2018. Insects and amphibians were the most studied organisms and ponds (ponds and pools) were the systems most studied. Patch-level metrics and landscape-level metrics were similarly reported. Beta diversity was more common than alpha diversity as a response variable, especially for those employing taxonomic data. Finally, most studies reported the effect of landscape separated from other variables, although the metrics used and their effects on metacommunities varied. Our understanding of how landscape affects the structure of metacommunities in lentic systems is still limited, because of the low number of studies, the approaches used to assess the contribution of landscape, and the variety of landscape metrics used in these studies. We recommend that future studies aiming to understand the role of landscape on metacommunities should avoid summarizing local and landscape variables or different landscape metrics into a single variable, but carefully choose the best landscape metric to match the hypothesis being tested.