Local and Regional Drivers of Biodiversity: From Life-History Traits to System-Level Properties

Biodiversity research aims to understand and predict the occurrence, abundance, and distribution of species and the diversity of species traits, body sizes, and functional roles in a community. Ecologists lack a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between processes driving biodiversity at differing spatiotemporal scales, hindering the ability to predict response to change. A crucial challenge facing ecologists is to incorporate knowledge of the regional dynamics and temporal stability of communities in biodiversity research. This dissertation investigates the role that species traits and system-level properties play in determining biodiversity at local sites and evaluates biodiversity response to change. Local and regional processes may regulate biodiversity via their different influences on core (common, temporally persistent) and transient (rare, temporally intermittent) species. In Chapter 2, we tested the hypothesis that core vs. transient species have fundamentally different life-history traits that are associated with survival strategies targeted at local vs. regional habitat use. Using long-term mark-recapture data from a rodent community, we found that core species generally had high ecological specialization, high survival, low dispersal rates, and low reproductive effort compared to transient species. Life-history trade-offs may correspond to differing roles in maintaining species richness and responses to environmental change. Macroecology describes patterns of biodiversity in communities without respect to species identities or traits. Diversity patterns (i.e., species-abundance distribution-SAD, species-area relationship-SAR, species-time relationship-STR) are well-studied, but drivers of these patterns are poorly understood. In Chapter 3, we tested the hypothesis that local-scale interactions influence the form of SADs, SARs, and STRs using long-term data from annual plant communities. Our results suggest that patterns are directly influenced by system-level properties (species richness, total abundance) and respond indirectly to local-scale processes. In Chapter 4, we analyzed data from a global-span database and found the SAD and species richness generally resilient to environmental change. This work suggests that local processes are important determinants of species composition and abundance and may set an upper limit to species richness, but that regional processes are responsible for maintaining richness and community structure. This insight may partially explain why many biodiversity metrics are often invariant under environmental change scenarios

Using Life History Trade-Offs to Understand Core-Transient Structuring of a Small Mammal Community

An emerging conceptual framework suggests that communities are composed of two main groups of species through time: core species that are temporally persistent, and transient species that are temporally intermittent. Core and transient species have been shown to differ in spatiotemporal turnover, diversity patterns, and importantly, survival strategies targeted at local versus regional habitat use. While the core-transient framework has typically been a site-specific designation for species, we suggest that if core and transient species have local versus regional survival strategies across sites, and consistently differ in population-level spatial structure and gene flow, they may also typically exhibit different life-history strategies. Specifically, core species should display relatively low movement rates, low reproductive effort, high ecological specialization and high survival rates compared to transient species, which may display a wider range of traits given that transience may result from source-sink dynamics or from the ability to emigrate readily in a nomadic fashion. We present results from 21 years of capture-mark-recapture data in a diverse rodent community, evaluating the linkages between temporal persistence, local abundance, and trade-offs among life-history traits. Core species at our site conservatively supported our hypotheses, differing in ecological specialization, survival and movement probabilities, and reproductive effort relative to transient species. Transient species exhibited a wider range of characteristics, which likely stems from the multiple processes generating transience in local communities, such as source-sink dynamics at larger regional scales or nomadic life history strategies. We suggest that trait associations among core-transient species may be similar in other systems and warrants further study

Skills and Knowledge for Data-Intensive Environmental Research.

The scale and magnitude of complex and pressing environmental issues lend urgency to the need for integrative and reproducible analysis and synthesis, facilitated by data-intensive research approaches. However, the recent pace of technological change has been such that appropriate skills to accomplish data-intensive research are lacking among environmental scientists, who more than ever need greater access to training and mentorship in computational skills. Here, we provide a roadmap for raising data competencies of current and next-generation environmental researchers by describing the concepts and skills needed for effectively engaging with the heterogeneous, distributed, and rapidly growing volumes of available data. We articulate five key skills: (1) data management and processing, (2) analysis, (3) software skills for science, (4) visualization, and (5) communication methods for collaboration and dissemination. We provide an overview of the current suite of training initiatives available to environmental scientists and models for closing the skill-transfer gap

Landscape-scale forest loss as a catalyst of population and biodiversity change

The BioTIME database was supported by ERC AdG BioTIME 250189 and ERC PoC BioCHANGE 727440. We thank the ERC projects BioTIME and BioCHANGE for supporting the initial data synthesis work that led to this study, and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity for continued funding of the database. Also supported by a Carnegie-Caledonian PhD Scholarship and NERC doctoral training partnership grant NE/L002558/1 (G.N.D.), a Leverhulme Fellowship and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (M.D.), Leverhulme Project Grant RPG-2019-402 (A.E.M. and M.D.), and the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig (funded by the German Research Foundation; FZT 118, S.A.B.).Global biodiversity assessments have highlighted land-use change as a key driver of biodiversity change. However, there is little empirical evidence of how habitat transformations such as forest loss and gain are reshaping biodiversity over time. We quantified how change in forest cover has influenced temporal shifts in populations and ecological assemblages from 6090 globally distributed time series across six taxonomic groups. We found that local-scale increases and decreases in abundance, species richness, and temporal species replacement (turnover) were intensified by as much as 48% after forest loss. Temporal lags in population- and assemblage-level shifts after forest loss extended up to 50 years and increased with species’ generation time. Our findings that forest loss catalyzes population and biodiversity change emphasize the complex biotic consequences of land-use change.PostprintPeer reviewe