Searching for predictable assembly processes in freshwater fish communities
À la recherche de processus de rassemblement prédictible dans les communautés de poissons d'eau douce
Résumé
The development of the metacommunity theory has highlighted the importance of taking regional dispersal into account to understand how species are assembled in local communities. Metacommunity studies have used two main approaches to seek for general processes regulating metacommunities: variation partitioning analysis to tease apart the influence of environmental and spatial factors and Elements of Metacommunity Structure to determine which distributional pattern best fit an empirical metacommunity. I will show how I've used these two approaches to search for non-random patterns and underlying assembly processes in three aquatic ecosystems with contrasting landscape structure: temperate lake-fishes in Canada, floodplain-fishes in Brazil and riverine fishes in France.