SGER: Climatically Induced Nonequilibria Determine Temporal Metacommunity Dynamics

2005年冬天，南加州几个世纪以来的降水记录被打破。这代表了一个紧急的，一生一次的机会来衡量沙漠生产力的大量自然增长对沙漠啮齿动物群落组织的影响。此外，这一及时的事件可以用来整合已经得到充分研究的西南沙漠啮齿动物群落与群落生态学的新范式-元群落概念。元群落结构描述了当地动物群落的区域特征，这些特征应该以可预测的方式变化，因为高生产力时期之后是相对低生产力的回归，这是沙漠生态系统的特征。预测将在莫哈韦国家保护区进行检验，并对整个保护区的30个啮齿动物群落的结构进行初步表征。每个社区将在拟议的资金下抽样两次，未来将寻求资金继续监测元社区结构。一套统计分析将把物种组成的变化分解为局部（物种环境相互作用）和区域（扩散效应）影响，这将为元群落概念的预测提供检验。

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.