Abstract
Predicting the dynamics of biotic communities is difficult because species' environmental responses are not independent, but covary due to shared or contrasting ecological strategies and the influence of species interactions. We used latent-variable joint species distribution models to analyze paired historical and contemporary inventories of 585 vascular plant species on 471 islands in the southwest Finnish archipelago. Larger, more heterogeneous islands were characterized by higher colonization rates and lower extinction rates. Ecological and taxonomical species groups explained small but detectable proportions of variance in species' environmental responses. To assess the potential influence of species interactions on community dynamics, we estimated species associations as species-to-species residual correlations for historical occurrences, for colorizations, and for extinctions. Historical species associations could to some extent predict joint colonization patterns, but the overall estimated influence of species associations on community dynamics was weak. These results illustrate the benefits of considering metacommunity dynamics within a joint framework, but also suggest that any influence of species interactions on community dynamics may be hard to detect from observational data.
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
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
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