Dispersal kernels influence the magnitude of environmental, biotic, and stochastic effects on the maintenance of metacommunity diversity
Wisnoski, N. I.; Szojka, M. C.; Germain, R. M.; Fukami, T.; Shoemaker, L. G.
Show abstract
Dispersal plays a central role in shaping patterns of diversity in metacommunities. However, a primary focus on emigration rates may mischaracterize dispersal effects that actually arise from dispersal kernels. Kernels describe probabilistic movements between donor and recipient patches, but the influence of kernel shape on metacommunity diversity remains unclear. We used simulations to measure how kernels affect diversity across metacommunity scales and ecological contexts. We disentangled causes of these patterns using a novel approach quantifying the effects of environmental filtering, competition, stochasticity, and dispersal on fitness. Although metacommunities with shallow kernels followed expectations where emigration increased alpha-but decreased beta- and gamma-diversity, metacommunities with steeper kernels did not. Steeper kernels maintained regional diversity by reducing interspecific competition and stochastic extinctions, with dispersal conferring weaker benefits but less homogenization. Our work suggests dispersal kernels and emigration rates jointly regulate exposure to environmental variation and the balance of assembly mechanisms in metacommunities.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Priority effects determine how dispersal affects biodiversity in seasonal metacommunities 98%
- The geography of metacommunities: landscape characteristics drive geographic variation in the assembly process through selecting species pool attributes 98%
- Metapopulations, the inflationary effect, and consequences for public health 96%
Similar papers in this journal
- At what spatial scales are alternative stable states relevant in highly interconnected ecosystems? 96%
- Dispersal limitation and fire feedbacks maintain mesic savannas in Madagascar 94%
- Diversity-stability relationships become decoupled across spatial scales: a synthesis of organism and ecosystem types 93%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.