Publication Date:
2023-10-28
Description:
Many metacommunity studies have considered only static snapshots of community composition, and either classified systems into idealized metacommunity types or identified relationships between community composition and species traits and/or habitat or patch characteristics. By contrast, studies of the Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography have investigated how island area and isolation relate to dynamical turnover in species composition. A gap exists between static evaluations of community composition and the full consideration of the effects of species traits and habitat or patch factors on the dynamics of metacommunities. We combined static and dynamics analyses of landbirds on land-bridge islands in China to test for differences in metacommunity characteristics of resident, migratory, wintering and breeding assemblages. We jointly estimated species colonization and extinction, and used models to test their relationships with species and island or habitat characteristics. This temporally dynamic view of metacommunities was complemented by a more static view of spatial variation obtained by using RLQ and fourth-corner analyses to test correspondence between island attributes, species attributes and metacommunity composition. Overall, resident bird assemblages showed strong associations between composition and habitat vertical structure, and on large islands extinction and turnover were lower than visitor assemblages in the same season. Visitor assemblages showed no significant habitat associations, and in winter had high extinction rates and small average body sizes. By contrast, summer visitors showed local extinction that was correlated with local species richness, indicating a likely effect of competition on extinction. Differences among assemblages in extinction, colonization and turnover also corresponded to differences in types of metacommunity dynamics. Our results demonstrate repeated patterns between species composition, bird traits, habitat/island characteristics and observed metacommunity dynamics, and have consequences for understanding spatial dynamics and conservation of different species assemblages.
Type:
Dataset
Format:
application/zip, 3 datasets
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