Community composition as an overlooked driver of spatial population synchrony.

ABSTRACT: Animal populations often display coherent temporal fluctuations in their abundance, with far-ranging implications for species persistence and ecosystem stability. The key mechanisms driving spatial population synchrony include organismal dispersal, spatially correlated environmental dynamics (Moran effect) and concordant consumer-resource dynamics. Disentangling these mechanisms, however, is notoriously difficult in natural systems, and the extent to which the biotic environment (intensity and types of biotic interactions) mediates metapopulation dynamics remains a largely unanswered question. Here, we test the hypothesis that compositional differences among communities (i.e. beta-diversity), used as a proxy of the differences in biotic interactions experienced by separated populations, re

SUBMITTER: Larsen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12402544 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature