Login | Register

Community assembly of island mammal metacommunities: The role of the regional species pool

Title:

Community assembly of island mammal metacommunities: The role of the regional species pool

Hébert, Katherine (2017) Community assembly of island mammal metacommunities: The role of the regional species pool. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

[thumbnail of Hebert_MSc_F2017.pdf]
Preview
Text (application/pdf)
Hebert_MSc_F2017.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Spectrum Terms of Access.
2MB

Abstract

One of community ecology’s fundamental challenges is to identify the community assembly mechanisms that shape diversity patterns. Previous studies have largely focused on the relative influence of neutral and niche-based mechanisms on community composition within a single region. However, the influence of the species pool on these mechanisms remains relatively unexplored, despite its potentially pivotal role in community assembly. The functional diversity available within the species pool is particularly relevant, as it could regulate how strongly species are sorted into local environmental niches. Here, we investigate how the species pool’s functional diversity influences the relative importance of dispersal and environmental filtering (i.e. species sorting) in structuring taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic β-diversity patterns within 9 insular non-volant mammal metacommunities, distributed across the globe. We find that dispersal limitation largely drives phylogenetic turnover patterns, suggesting that colonization is the primary obstacle during community assembly of insular metacommunities. However, we did not find a universal trend in the relative importance of dispersal and environmental filtering across metacommunities. The functional diversity available within the species pool was also not consistently related to the strength of species sorting. We conclude that the ecological model of species sorting does not adequately represent community assembly. This raises questions about how the incorporation of evolutionary processes such as speciation and adaptation into the metacommunity framework would improve our understanding of community assembly.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Biology
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:Hébert, Katherine
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M. Sc.
Program:Biology
Date:20 September 2017
Thesis Supervisor(s):Lessard, Jean-Philippe and Millien, Virginie
Keywords:community ecology, community assembly, species pool, islands, mammals, metacommunities, beta-diversity
ID Code:982801
Deposited By: KATHERINE HEBERT
Deposited On:16 Nov 2017 14:54
Last Modified:18 Jan 2018 17:55

References:

Baselga, A. (2010). Partitioning the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 19, 134-143.
Blanchet, F.G., Legendre, P. & Borcard, D. (2008). Forward selection of explanatory variables. Ecology, 89, 2623-2632.
Borcard, D. & Legendre, P. (2002). All-scale spatial analysis of ecological data by means of principal coordinates of neighbour matrices. Ecological Modelling, 153, 51-68.
Borcard, D., Legendre, P. & Drapeau, P. (1992). Partialling out the spatial component of ecological variation. Ecology, 73, 1045-1055.
Brown, J.H., Gillooly, J.F., Allen, A.P., Savage, V.M. & West, G.B. (2004). Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology, 85, 1771-1789.
Cardillo, M., Mace, G.M., Jones, K.E., Bielby, J., Bininda-Emonds, O.R., Sechrest, W. et al. (2005). Multiple causes of high extinction risk in large mammal species. Science, 309, 1239-1241.
Carstensen, D.W., Lessard, J.P., Holt, B.G., Krabbe Borregaard, M. & Rahbek, C. (2013). Introducing the biogeographic species pool. Ecography, 36, 1310-1318.
Cavender-Bares, J., Kozak, K.H., Fine, P.V. & Kembel, S.W. (2009). The merging of community ecology and phylogenetic biology. Ecology letters, 12, 693-715.
Chase, J.M., Kraft, N.J., Smith, K.G., Vellend, M. & Inouye, B.D. (2011). Using null models to disentangle variation in community dissimilarity from variation in α‐diversity. Ecosphere, 2, 1-11.
Chase, J.M. & Myers, J.A. (2011). Disentangling the importance of ecological niches from stochastic processes across scales. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences, 366, 2351-2363.
Cornell, H.V. (1985). Local and regional richness of cynipine gall wasps on California oaks. Ecology, 66, 1247-1260.
Cornell, H.V. & Harrison, S.P. (2014). What are species pools and when are they important? Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 45, 45-67.
Emerson, B.C. & Gillespie, R.G. (2008). Phylogenetic analysis of community assembly and structure over space and time. Trends in ecology & evolution, 23, 619-630.
Fabre, P.H., Chaval, Y., Mortelliti, A., Nicolas, V., Wells, K., Michaux, J.R. et al. (2016). Molecular phylogeny of South‐East Asian arboreal murine rodents. Zoologica Scripta, 45, 349-364.
Faurby, S., Svenning, J.-C., Kerkhoff, A.J. & Kalisz, S. (2016). Resurrection of the Island Rule: Human-Driven Extinctions Have Obscured a Basic Evolutionary Pattern. The American Naturalist, 187, 812-820.
Fritz, S.A., Bininda‐Emonds, O.R. & Purvis, A. (2009). Geographical variation in predictors of mammalian extinction risk: big is bad, but only in the tropics. Ecology letters, 12, 538- 549.
Gotelli, N.J. & Graves, G.R. (1996). Null models in ecology. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.
Graham, C.H. & Fine, P.V. (2008). Phylogenetic beta diversity: linking ecological and evolutionary processes across space in time. Ecology letters, 11, 1265-1277.
Hanski, I. & Gilpin, M. (1991). Metapopulation dynamics: brief history and conceptual domain. Biological journal of the Linnean Society, 42, 3-16.
Heaney, L.R. (1984). Mammalian species richness on islands on the Sunda Shelf, southeast Asia. Oecologia, 61, 11-17.
Hijmans, R., Garcia, N. & Wieczorek, J. (2010). GADM: database of global administrative areas. V ersion.
Hijmans, R.J., Cameron, S.E., Parra, J.L., Jones, P.G. & Jarvis, A. (2005). Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International journal of climatology, 25, 1965-1978.
Holyoak, M., Leibold, M.A. & Holt, R.D. (2005a). Metacommunities: spatial dynamics and ecological communities. University of Chicago Press.
Holyoak, M., Leibold, M.A., Mouquet, N., Holt, R.D. & Hoopes, M. (2005b). A framework for large scale community ecology. Metacommunities: spatial dynamics and ecological communities. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1-31.
Hubbell, S.P. (2001). The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton University Press.
Hubert, N., Calcagno, V., Etienne, R.S. & Mouquet, N. (2015). Metacommunity speciation models and their implications for diversification theory. Ecology letters, 18, 864-881.
IUCN (2016). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2016-3. .
Jacquet, C., Mouillot, D., Kulbicki, M. & Gravel, D. (2016). Extensions of Island Biogeography Theory predict the scaling of functional trait composition with habitat area and isolation.
Ecology Letters.
Keddy, P.A. (1992). Assembly and response rules: two goals for predictive community ecology.
Journal of Vegetation Science, 3, 157-164.
Kier, G., Kreft, H., Lee, T.M., Jetz, W., Ibisch, P.L., Nowicki, C. et al. (2009). A global
assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 9322-9327.
Kissling, W.D., Dalby, L., Fløjgaard, C., Lenoir, J., Sandel, B., Sandom, C. et al. (2014).
Establishing macroecological trait datasets: digitalization, extrapolation, and validation of
diet preferences in terrestrial mammals worldwide. Ecology and evolution, 4, 2913-2930. Kraft, N.J., Cornwell, W.K., Webb, C.O. & Ackerly, D.D. (2007). Trait Evolution, Community
Assembly, and the Phylogenetic Structure of Ecological Communities. The American
Naturalist, 170, 271-283.
Laliberté, E. (2011). Package ‘FD’.
Laliberté, E. & Legendre, P. (2010). A distance based framework for measuring functional
diversity from multiple traits. Ecology, 91, 299-305.
Lawlor, T.E. (1986). Comparative biogeography of mammals on islands. Biological Journal of
the Linnean Society, 28, 99-125.
Legendre, P., Borcard, D. & Peres-Neto, P.R. (2005). Analyzing beta diversity: partitioning the
spatial variation of community composition data. Ecological Monographs, 75, 435-450. Legendre, P. & Legendre, L.F. (2012). Numerical ecology. Elsevier.
Leibold, M.A., Holyoak, M., Mouquet, N., Amarasekare, P., Chase, J.M., Hoopes, M.F. et al.
(2004). The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecology.
Ecology letters, 7, 601-613.
Leprieur, F., Albouy, C., De Bortoli, J., Cowman, P.F., Bellwood, D.R. & Mouillot, D. (2012).
Quantifying phylogenetic beta diversity: distinguishing between ‘true’turnover of lineages and phylogenetic diversity gradients. PLoS One, 7, e42760.
Lessard, J.-P., Belmaker, J., Myers, J.A., Chase, J.M. & Rahbek, C. (2012). Inferring local ecological processes amid species pool influences. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27, 600-607.
Lessard, J.-P., Borregaard, M.K., Fordyce, J.A., Rahbek, C., Weiser, M.D., Dunn, R.R. et al. (2011). Strong influence of regional species pools on continent-wide structuring of local communities. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, rspb20110552.
Lindstedt, S.L., Miller, B.J. & Buskirk, S.W. (1986). Home range, time, and body size in mammals. Ecology, 67, 413-418.
Loeuille, N. & Leibold, M.A. (2008). Evolution in metacommunities: on the relative importance of species sorting and monopolization in structuring communities. The American Naturalist, 171, 788-799.
Logue, J.B., Mouquet, N., Peter, H., Hillebrand, H. & Group, M.W. (2011). Empirical approaches to metacommunities: a review and comparison with theory. Trends in ecology & evolution, 26, 482-491.
Lomolino, M.V. (1985). Body size of mammals on islands: the island rule reexamined. The American Naturalist, 125, 310-316.
Losos, J.B. & Ricklefs, R.E. (2009). Adaptation and diversification on islands. Nature, 457, 830- 836.
Losos, J.B., Warheit, K.I. & Schoener, T.W. (1997). Adaptive differentiation following experimental island colonization in Anolis lizards. Nature, 387, 70.
MacArthur, R.H. & Wilson, E.O. (1963). An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography. Evolution, 373-387.
Millien, V. & Gonzalez, A. (2011). The maximal body mass–area relationship in island mammals. Journal of biogeography, 38, 2278-2285.
Millien-Parra, V. & Jaeger, J.J. (1999). Island biogeography of the Japanese terrestrial mammal assemblages: an example of a relict fauna. Journal of Biogeography, 26, 959-972. Mittelbach, G.G. & Schemske, D.W. (2015). Ecological and evolutionary perspectives on
community assembly. Trends in ecology & evolution, 30, 241-247.
Myers, J.A., Chase, J.M., Jiménez, I., Jørgensen, P.M., Araujo‐Murakami, A., Paniagua‐
Zambrana, N. et al. (2013). Beta‐diversity in temperate and tropical forests reflects
dissimilar mechanisms of community assembly. Ecology letters, 16, 151-157.
Oksanen, J., Kindt, R., Legendre, P., O’Hara, B., Stevens, M.H.H., Oksanen, M.J. et al. (2007).
The vegan package. Community ecology package, 10, 631-637.
Pavoine, S. & Bonsall, M.B. (2011). Measuring biodiversity to explain community assembly: a
unified approach. Biological Reviews, 86, 792-812.
Peres-Neto, P.R., Legendre, P., Dray, S. & Borcard, D. (2006). Variation partitioning of species
data matrices: estimation and comparison of fractions. Ecology, 87, 2614-2625. QGIS Development Team (2016). QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source
Geospatial Foundation Project.
Questad, E.J. & Foster, B.L. (2008). Coexistence through spatio‐temporal heterogeneity and
species sorting in grassland plant communities. Ecology letters, 11, 717-726.
Revell, L.J. (2012). phytools: an R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other
things). Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3, 217-223.
Ricklefs, R.E. (1987). Community diversity: relative roles of local and regional processes.
Science(Washington), 235, 167-171.
Safi, K., Cianciaruso, M.V., Loyola, R.D., Brito, D., Armour-Marshall, K. & Diniz-Filho, J.A.F. (2011). Understanding global patterns of mammalian functional and phylogenetic diversity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 366, 2536-2544.
Santini, L., González-Suárez, M., Rondinini, C. & Di Marco, M. (2017). Shifting baseline in macroecology? Unraveling the influence of human impact on mammalian body mass. Diversity and Distributions.
Siefert, A., Ravenscroft, C., Weiser, M.D. & Swenson, N.G. (2013). Functional beta‐diversity patterns reveal deterministic community assembly processes in eastern North American trees. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 22, 682-691.
Simmons, A. (2012). Mediterranean island voyages. science, 338, 895-897.
Smith, F.A. & Lyons, S.K. (2011). How big should a mammal be? A macroecological look at
mammalian body size over space and time. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 366, 2364-2378.
Tucker, C.M., Shoemaker, L.G., Davies, K.F., Nemergut, D.R. & Melbourne, B.A. (2015).
Differentiating between niche and neutral assembly in metacommunities using null
models of β‐diversity. Oikos.
Urban, M.C., Leibold, M.A., Amarasekare, P., De Meester, L., Gomulkiewicz, R., Hochberg,
M.E. et al. (2008). The evolutionary ecology of metacommunities. Trends in ecology &
evolution, 23, 311-317.
Vigne, J.-D. (1992). Zooarchaeology and the biogeographical history of the mammals of Corsica
and Sardinia since the last ice age. Mammal Review, 22, 87-96.
Villéger, S., Grenouillet, G. & Brosse, S. (2013). Decomposing functional β‐diversity reveals that
low functional β‐diversity is driven by low functional turnover in European fish
assemblages. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 22, 671-681.
Warren, B.H., Simberloff, D., Ricklefs, R.E., Aguilée, R., Condamine, F.L., Gravel, D. et al. (2015). Islands as model systems in ecology and evolution: prospects fifty years after
MacArthur‐Wilson. Ecology Letters, 18, 200-217.
Weigelt, P., Jetz, W. & Kreft, H. (2013). Bioclimatic and physical characterization of the world’s
islands. PNAS, 110, 18.
Western, D. (1979). Size, life history and ecology in mammals. African Journal of Ecology, 17,
185-204.
Whittaker, R.H. (1960). Vegetation of the Siskiyou mountains, Oregon and California.
Ecological monographs, 30, 279-338.
Whittaker, R.J., Triantis, K.A. & Ladle, R.J. (2008). A general dynamic theory of oceanic island
biogeography. Journal of Biogeography, 35, 977-994.
Wiens, J.J. & Donoghue, M.J. (2004). Historical biogeography, ecology and species richness.
Trends in ecology & evolution, 19, 639-644.
Wilman, H., Belmaker, J., Simpson, J., de la Rosa, C., Rivadeneira, M.M. & Jetz, W. (2014).
EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals.
Ecology, 95, 2027-2027.
Wilson, D.S. (1992). Complex interactions in metacommunities, with implications for
biodiversity and higher levels of selection. Ecology, 73, 1984-2000.
Zeder, M.A. (2008). Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins,
diffusion, and impact. Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences, 105, 11597- 11604.
Zobel, M. (1997). The relative of species pools in determining plant species richness: an alternative explanation of species coexistence? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 12, 266- 269.
Zuur, A.F., Ieno, E.N. & Elphick, C.S. (2010). A protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 1, 3-14.
All items in Spectrum are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved. The use of items is governed by Spectrum's terms of access.

Repository Staff Only: item control page

Downloads per month over past year

Research related to the current document (at the CORE website)
- Research related to the current document (at the CORE website)
Back to top Back to top