Detecting Historical Biogeography and Adaptive Niche Shifts In a Metacommunity

Historically, community ecology has focused on relatively local mechanisms to explain the distribution of species in space and time. Recently, the concept of a metacommunity has enlarged the spatial and temporal scope of community ecology but this approach has yet to adequately address scales that are most relevant to paleontological studies. However, a general framework for doing so can be developed on the basis of variation decomposition of community samples in relation to environment, patchiness, landscape, and historical factors. Additionally, this can be done in a phylogenetic framework to allow the evaluation of evolutionary history on such dynamics. I will describe this general framework and illustrate its use in evaluating the role of historical biogeography and adaptive habitat niche shifts in two contrasting clades of zooplankton. Our findings show that adaptive niche shifts are stronger, and historical effects of biogeography due to post-Pleistocene recovery weaker, in daphniids than in calanoid copepods and that this can be explained by the higher colonization ability of daphniids.