Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Contributed Talk

Session: : Communities: Spatial Patterns And Environmental Gradients 8

COS 167-4 - Distance matters: quantifying the spatial scale of land cover influences on biological communities

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
10:45 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
Location: B119
Abstract: Land cover and land cover changes have been shown to profoundly shape the distribution of species and genes across Earth. The quantification of the importance of land cover on biodiversity is intrinsically tied to the quantification of the spatial scale at which land cover acts. Typically, this dependency is resolved by means of ad hoc approaches, such as using expert judgement to determine the spatial scale, or by performing stepwise model selection to discriminate among candidate spatial scales. We propose a joint species distribution model that jointly quantifies the importance as well as the spatial scale of land cover influences, relying on a spatial extension of the distributed lag modeling approach. As such, a model-based and data-driven spatial weighing of the land cover surrounding each focal site is performed, requiring minimal decisions from the modeler's side. Our model also features other component to account for the spatio-temporal structure and multi-species nature of community data, as well as for imperfect and heterogeneous detection across surveys. We apply the model to a large opportunistic dataset on odonate sightings collected by naturalists, encompassing over 10,000 visited waterbodies in Belgium. By doing so, we were able to reveal drivers underlying the community structure of lentic odonates in the region, while taking the intrinsic challenges of opportunistic biodiversity data into account. In addition to spatial and temporal drivers, we found land cover to strongly influence local communities. Our approach simultaneously enabled us to quantify the spatial scale at which land cover influences the distribution of species across the landscape. For most species, we find that land use at short distances around waterbodies (< 200 m) is dominant in explaining variation. In conclusion, our approach increases biological realism when modelling land cover influences and contributes to an improved understanding of the drivers of biological community structure.