Refining Predictions of Metacommunity Dynamics by Modeling Species Non‐independence

Øystein H Opedal,Mikael Von Numers,Otso Ovaskainen,Gleb Tikhonov

doi:10.1002/bes2.1717

Abstract

Species’ responses to environmental change are not independent, but covary due to shared ecology and the influence of species interactions. We analyzed paired inventories of all plant species on 471 islands in the southwest Finnish archipelago, conducted 80 years apart. Recently developed joint species distribution models allowed us to test whether a signal of species interactions exists in the vegetation dynamics in the study area. We found that species that tended to occur on the same islands 80 years ago also tended to exhibit similar dynamics over time. In contrast, we detected limited evidence that species interactions structure these dynamics. This photograph illustrates the article “Refining predictions of metacommunity dynamics by modelling species non-independence” by Øystein H. Opedal, Mikael von Numers, Gleb Tikhonov, Otso Ovaskainen published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3067.

Highlights

Predicting the dynamics of biotic communities over time is a fundamental challenge of ecology, and of undeniable importance in a time of rapid environmental change
An important reason for this is that species are not independent units responding to external environmental drivers, but are dependent on the dynamics of the community to which they belong
Of the total variance explained by the model, time explained on average 4.7%, the geographical covariates explained 31.7%, and the spatial latent factors representing unmeasured environmental variation as well as species associations explained 63.6% (Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Predicting the dynamics of biotic communities over time is a fundamental challenge of ecology, and of undeniable importance in a time of rapid environmental change. An important reason for this is that species are not independent units responding to external environmental drivers, but are dependent on the dynamics of the community to which they belong. Ecologically similar species may respond to environmental drivers, leading to synchronized (meta-)population dynamics. This view is central to the research program centred on species’ functional traits (McGill et al 2006), where ‘response traits’ are those attributes of species that are predictive of environmental responses (Lavorel and Garnier 2002, Suding et al 2008). An advantage of leveraging phylogenetic information as a complement to trait data is that species relatedness may convey information about the net phenotypic similarities among species (aspects of ecological similarity not captured by individual traits), or traits that are ecologically relevant but difficult to measure

Methods

Results

Conclusion