Assembly processes inferred from eDNA surveys of a pond metacommunity are consistent with known species ecologies

Cai, Wang, Pichler, Maximilian, Biggs, Jeremy, Nicolet, Pascale, Ewald, Naomi, Griffiths, Richard A., Bush, Alex, Leibold, Mathew A., Hartig, Florian and Yu, Douglas W. (2025) Assembly processes inferred from eDNA surveys of a pond metacommunity are consistent with known species ecologies. Ecography. ISSN 0906-7590

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Abstract

Technological advances are enabling ecologists to conduct large-scale and structured community surveys. However, it is unclear how best to extract information from these novel community data. We metabarcoded 48 vertebrate species from their eDNA in 320 ponds across England and applied the ‘internal structure' approach, which uses joint species distribution models (JSDMs) to explain compositions as the result of four metacommunity processes: environmental filtering, dispersal, species interactions, and stochasticity. We confirm that environmental filtering plays an important role in community assembly, and find that species' estimated environmental preferences are consistent with known ecologies. We also detect negative biotic covariances between fish and amphibians after controlling for divergent environmental preferences, consistent with predator–prey interactions (likely mediated by predator avoidance behaviour), and we detect high spatial autocorrelation for the palmate newt, consistent with its hypothesised relict distribution. Promisingly, ecologically and spatially distinctive sites are better explained by their environmental covariates and geographic locations, respectively, revealing sites where environmental filtering and dispersal limitation act more strongly. These results are consistent with the recent proposal that applying JSDMs to species distribution patterns can help reveal the relative importance of environmental filtering, dispersal limitation, and biotic interaction processes for individual sites and species. Our results also highlight the value of the modern interpretation of metacommunity ecology, which embraces the fact that assembly processes differ among species and sites. We discuss how novel community data allow for several study design improvements that will strengthen the inference of metacommunity assembly processes from observational data.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Transparent peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/ecog.07461. Data availability statement: Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nk98sf7vr (Cai et al. 2025). Funding information: WC was supported by the Postdoctoral Fellowship of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023M743747), Yunnan CAIYUN Postdoctoral Foundation and the Kunming Institute of Zoology. MAL is supported by NSF award 2025118. DWY was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC2602500), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant (XDA20050202), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41661144002), and the Yunnan Revitalization Talent Support Program: High-end Foreign Expert Project. This paper is an output of the sCom working group supported by sDiv, the Synthesis Centre of iDiv (DFG FZT 118, 202548816).
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Feb 2025 15:30
Last Modified:	11 Feb 2025 17:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98417
DOI:	10.1101/2023.12.12.571176v2

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