%0 Journal Article
%T Pattern of species occurrence in detritus-based communities with variable connectivity
%A B. Bellisario
%A F. Cerfolli
%A G. Nascetti
%J Web Ecology (WE)
%D 2011
%I Copernicus Publications
%R 10.5194/we-11-1-2011
%X Patterns and mechanisms of species occurrence in space and time are outstanding questions in community and conservation ecology. Much of the current debate focuses on randomness or non-randomness in the structuring process of ecological communities, and the extent to which local/deterministic or regional/stochastic processes may drive their composition. However, a categorical subdivision could be misleading, as community composition may be driven by a continuum between neutral- and niche-based processes. For instance, in spatially structured systems local processes may surpass regional processes over time or across space to derive non-random metacommunity structure, suggesting the filtering role of the environment in mediating the pattern of species occurrence. In this work we study the temporal composition of detritus-based communities, which are an essential component in many aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. We used data about macroinvertebrate colonization of leaf detritus in different sites of a patchy-connected system, to measure the co-occurrence of species on the detrital resource and evaluate the role of the spatial configuration and the environmental variability in determining the community¡¯s composition. Our results show the importance of considering the joint role of regional and local processes in mediating stochastic and deterministic mechanisms in species assemblage, with important outcomes from a conservation point of view.
%U http://www.web-ecol.net/11/1/2011/we-11-1-2011.pdf