A community of metacommunities: exploring patterns in species distributions across large geographical areas

• DOI: 10.1890/12-0683.1
• Publication Date: 2012-10-17T22:39:58Z
• Authors: Renato Henriques-...; Zoë Lindo; Pedro R. Peres-Neto
• Keywords: Metacommunity; Community; Distance decay

Ecological communities show extremely complex patterns of variation in space, and quantifying the relative importance spatial environmental factors underpinning species distributions is one main goals community ecology. Although we have accumulated good knowledge about processes driving within metacommunities, few insights whether (and how) features can actually generate consistent distributional across multiple metacommunities. In this paper applied elements metacommunity structure (EMS) framework to identify classify metacommunities according but discrete distributions. Given that each pattern has unique underlying structuring mechanisms, exploring comparing such spanning large geographical areas provides a way test existence general principles study, EMS into data set containing 9000 lakes distributed 85 fish Ontario, Canada, estimated local explaining their patterns. Nested Clementsian gradients were fitted most metacommunities; nested throughout province, while gradient concentrated southeastern region. Sixty-five percent located low-energy watersheds (i.e., colder climate shorter growing season), whereas representing present high-energy relatively warmer longer season). Taken together, our results reveal properties which are embedded at least partially responsible for