Measuring temporal turnover in ecological communities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework and metric for measuring temporal turnover in ecological communities, emphasizing community dynamics and providing deeper insights into species and environmental contributions to change.

Contribution

It develops a novel temporal turnover measure based on community dynamics, improving upon traditional spatial metrics and enabling detailed analysis of community composition and abundance changes.

Findings

The new measure offers additional insights over traditional metrics.

It distinguishes between shifts in community composition and abundance.

Application to an estuarine fish community demonstrates its effectiveness.

Abstract

Range migrations in response to climate change, invasive species and the emergence of novel ecosystems highlight the importance of temporal turnover in community composition as a fundamental part of global change in the Anthropocene. Temporal turnover is usually quantified using a variety of metrics initially developed to capture spatial change. However, temporal turnover is the consequence of unidirectional community dynamics resulting from processes such as population growth, colonisation and local extinction. Here, we develop a framework based on community dynamics, and propose a new temporal turnover measure. A simulation study and an analysis of an estuarine fish community both clearly demonstrate that our proposed turnover measure offers additional insights relative to spatial-context-based metrics. Our approach reveals whether community turnover is due to shifts in community composition or in community abundance, and identifies the species and/or environmental factors that are responsible for any change.