SGER: Climatically Induced Nonequilibria Determine Temporal Metacommunity Dynamics

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During the winter of 2005, centuries long records of precipitation were broken in southern California. This represents an urgent, once in a lifetime opportunity to measure the effects of a large natural increase in desert productivity on the community organization of desert rodents. Moreover, such a timely event can be used to integrate the well-studied rodent communities of southwestern deserts with a new paradigm in community ecology, the metacommunity concept. Metacommunity structure describes regional level characteristics of local animal communities, which should vary in predictable ways as the period of high producivity is followed by a return to the relative low productivity that characterizes desert ecosystems. Predictions will be examined in the Mojave National Preserve with an initial characterization of the structure of 30 rodent communities throughout the preserve. Each community will be sampled twice under proposed funding and future funding will be pursued for continued monitoring of metacommunity structure. A suite of statistical analyses will decompose variation in species composition into local (species environment interactions) and regional (dispersal effects) influences, which will provide a test of the predictions of the metacommunity concept.