Scaling the relative dominance of exogenous drivers in structuring desert small mammal assemblages

Abstract

Assemblage patterns could be primarily generated by two types of drivers: exogenous (such as environmental and climatic factors) and endogenous (interactions such as competition, predation, mutualism or herbivory). The most widely accepted hypothesis states that at smaller scales (such as patch scale), interspecific interactions are the major drivers structuring communities, whereas at larger regional scales, factors such as climate, topography and soil act as ecological filters that determine assemblage composition. The general aim of this paper is to compare different exogenous drivers in terms of their relative dominance in structuring desert small mammal communities across a range of spatial scales, from patch to regional, and compare them with previous results on endogenous drivers. Our results show that as spatial scale increases, the explanatory power of exogenous factors also increases, e.g. from 17% at the patch scale (i.e. abundance) to 99% at the regional scale (i.e. diversity). Moreover, environmental drivers vary in type and strength depending on the community estimator across several spatial scales. On the other hand, endogenous drivers such as interspecific interactions are more important at the patch scale, diminishing in importance towards the regional scale. Therefore, the relative importance of exogenous versus endogenous drivers affects small mammal assemblage structure at different spatial scales. Our results fill up a knowledge gap concerning ecological drivers of assemblage structure at intermediate spatial scales for Monte desert small mammals, and highlight the importance of dealing with multi-causal factors in explaining ecological patterns of assemblages.