PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 19: Biodiversity
Wednesday, August 10, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Exhibit Hall 220 A-E, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Effects of the temporal structure of individuals on temporal turnover in two desert communities.
White, Ethan*,1, 2, 3, Gilchrist, Michael4, 1 Department of Biology, Logan, UT, USA2 Ecology Center, Logan, UT, USA3 Department of Biology, Logan, UT, USA4 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Knoxville, TN, USA
ABSTRACT- Understanding temporal turnover in the species composition of ecological systems is a long standing, yet understudied, challenge in ecology. We attempt to understand of temporal turnover by evaluating underlying patterns in the abundance of individual species along the time-series of rodent and summer annual plant communities from a long term study near Portal, AZ. Species in both communities demonstrated non-random aggregation of individuals through time. The majority of rodent species, but less than 10% of plant species, demonstrated significant temporal autocorrelation in abundance. A statistical model incorporating aggregation performed much better than a random placement model in describing observed turnover patterns (as quantified by the species-time relationship) for both communities. Randomizations suggest that including intraspecific temporal autocorrelation as well as aggregation improved the estimation of temporal turnover patterns, and in the case of the rodent community provided a good overall fit to the observed data. Because patterns in the temporal turnover of a community result from the population dynamics of its component species, models (both statistical and otherwise) that attempt to connect the apparently general behavior of compositional turnover to the more complex dynamics of populations are important for furthering our understanding of the dynamics of species composition.
Key words: Temporal turnover, Species-time relationship, Aggregation