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Accounting for connectivity alters the apparent roles of spatial and environmental processes on metacommunity assembly

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Abstract

Context

Understanding the relative contributions of spatial and environmental processes on community assembly is a central question in ecology. Despite this long-standing interest, our understanding of how landscape structure may drive spatial processes of community assembly remains poorly understood in part because of the challenge of tracking community assembly across landscapes and quantifying key aspects of landscapes that may impact assembly processes.

Objectives

We examined the roles of spatial and environmental processes on structuring assemblies of ants in 72 cleared patches embedded within a forested landscape.

Methods

To examine the role of spatial processes, we contrasted the use of geographic distances between patches and effective distances estimated from connectivity modeling accounting for matrix vegetation structure hypothesized to be important for ant community assembly. To examine the role of environmental processes, we quantified patch age and abundance of a key competitor and invasive species, the fire ant Solenopsis invicta.

Results

We found evidence for the importance of both spatial and environmental processes in structuring ant communities. When spatial processes were quantified as geographic distance, environmental variables were the predominant factors accounting for variation in ant community dissimilarity among patches. However, accounting for matrix resistance with circuit-theoretic connectivity modeling resulted in higher accounting of variation in ant community dissimilarity than geographic distance and changed the predominant variables accounting for that variation from environmental to spatial processes.

Conclusions

These findings show that accounting for connectivity through the matrix can be decisive in determining the primary drivers of community assembly.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the USDA Forest Service–Savannah River for facilitating this research, especially John Blake, Andy Horcher, Ed Olson, Kim Wright, and Anne Poole. We thank Hannah Penn for assistance in the lab. This research was supported by an NSF-GRFP and by funds provided to the USDA Forest Service-Savannah River, under Interagency Agreement DE-AI09- 00SR22188 with DOE, Aiken, South Carolina. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Julian Resasco

  2. Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL32611, USA

    Robert J. Fletcher Jr

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Correspondence to Julian Resasco.

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Resasco, J., Fletcher, R.J. Accounting for connectivity alters the apparent roles of spatial and environmental processes on metacommunity assembly. Landscape Ecol 36, 1089–1099 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01203-z

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