Abstract
The metacommunity concept and associated models are poorly integrated with the field of landscape ecology. One way to promote synthesis is to identify situations in which specific metacommunity models correspond to specific and explicit spatial patterns in the distribution of communities across space. We explore this possible link using mapped communities of twig-nesting ants on coffee plants from a plantation in southern Mexico. Previous work has shown species sorting to predominate among common species and mass effects among rare species. We test whether differential patterns of spatial clustering among dominant and subdominant ant species correspond to a species sorting and mass effects model, respectively. We find significant clustering among subdominant species in two of six sites and no clustering among dominants. At the species level, significant clustering was observed in 23% of cases. These results partially support our hypothesis and may be explained mechanistically by the interstitial hypothesis, whereby rare species persist in gaps among dominants. At the spatial scales we examined, we found no support for the ant-mosaic. Our results suggest further study linking metacommunity models to specific and explicit spatial patterns may yield insights on pattern and process relationships in landscapes. (Keywords: spatial pattern, clustering, dispersal, twig-nesting ants, tropical agroecosystem, landscape)
Highlights
Community ecology is undergoing a major transformation to multi-scale spatial approaches driven in part by the metacommunity concept (Holyoak et al 2005; Logue et al 2011), where a metacommunity is defined as a set of local communities linked by the dispersal of multiple interacting species (Leibold et al 2004)
One issue is that most theoretical and empirical work on metacommunities has been spatially implicit and aimed at process-based general synthesis. This contrasts with the field of landscape ecology, which centers on the generation and consequences of spatially explicit patterns
Mean colony size of dominant ant colonies was significantly larger in the two sites showing clustering (2.39 (SE= 0.19) versus 1.98 (SE= 0.1) nests per colony, P< 0.05, F= 4.4, N= 330, df= 1, ANOVA), but no significant differences were observed in occupancy rates or coffee plant size
Summary
Community ecology is undergoing a major transformation to multi-scale spatial approaches driven in part by the metacommunity concept (Holyoak et al 2005; Logue et al 2011), where a metacommunity is defined as a set of local communities linked by the dispersal of multiple interacting species (Leibold et al 2004). One issue is that most theoretical and empirical work on metacommunities has been spatially implicit (i.e., the spatial arrangement of local community patches is ignored) and aimed at process-based general synthesis This contrasts with the field of landscape ecology, which centers on the generation and consequences of spatially explicit patterns There are at least two ways to achieve such a synthesis: 1) identify landscape features that are expected to generate particular metacommunity dynamics (Biswas & Wagner 2012) and 2) identify situations in which specific spatially-explicit community patterns (the "community landscape") help identify underlying metacommunity dynamics We focus on this second possible point of intersection because it has not been considered previously. These hypotheses are likely overly simplistic (Sanders et al 2007) and have not been considered in light of dispersal processes
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