Abstract
Community structure is determined by a variety of ecological mechanisms, including environmental control, dispersal, and historical contingency. Recently, many studies have focused on the relative relevance of environment and dispersal in shaping metacommunities. Historical contingency (e.g., priority effects) rarely has been considered, although it could have a key role. In this context, the use of paleoecological methods could help assess the influence of past events on the present-day communities. In this survey, we compare living ostracod assemblages (i.e., biocoenoses) and subfossil assemblages (i.e., taphocoenoses) from 22 steppic shallow lakes and determine the relative contribution of environmental and spatial components on both assemblages. In addition, we estimate the role of putative priority effects of past assemblages on contemporary ones. Our results indicate a high concordance between both assemblages (Procrustes analysis; r = 0.877; P = 0.001). However, environment dominates over space in explaining the biocoenoses, whereas in taphocoenoses space dominates over environment. Furthermore, the contemporary metacommunity structure was related not only to pure environmental and spatial effects (suggesting species sorting and dispersal constraints) but also notably to pure historical effects, suggesting a significant major role of earlier habitat occupation in these ecosystems.
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Acknowledgements
This work was carried out in the framework of the project ECOLAKE “Ecological patterns in endorheic lakes: the keys to their conservation, CGL2012-38909,” funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain and by the European Union through the European Fund for Regional Development (FEDER) “One way to make Europe.” Carlos Rochera is a recipient of a VALi + d postdoctoral contract of Generalitat Valenciana APOSTD/2015/088. We thank all members of the project and specially Xavier Armengol, Antonio Picazo, José Antonio Gil-Delgado, Rafael U. Gosálvez, Ángel Velasco, Celia Laguna, and Máximo Florín for their suggestions and help in the field. We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor L.M. Bini for their constructive suggestions to an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Castillo-Escrivà, A., Valls, L., Rochera, C. et al. Disentangling environmental, spatial, and historical effects on ostracod communities in shallow lakes. Hydrobiologia 787, 61–72 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-016-2945-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-016-2945-x