Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Marine Science
Major Professor
Christopher D. Stallings, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Joshua Kilborn, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Don Chambers, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Mathew Leibold, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Theodore Switzer, Ph.D.
Keywords
long-term monitoring, community assembly, elements of metacommunity structure, hierarchical modeling of species communities, dispersal, species interactions
Abstract
The processes of diversification, selection, dispersal, and stochastic drift can combine in many ways to assemble ecological communities. A key focus in ecology is to describe and quantify the relative influences of these processes for different systems and explain the mechanisms by which these processes produce patterns of community structure. To accomplish this goal, ecologists have developed several frameworks that seek to integrate processes that occur locally andregionally. The metacommunity concept treats local communities as pieces of a broader landscape that are connected through dispersal of their constituent organisms. Empirical studies have generally lagged behind the development of metacommunity theory. Marine and coastal metacommunities are particularly underrepresented in the empirical body of work. In this dissertation, I present three studies of coastal and marine metacommunities that sought to improve our understanding of how environmental filtering, biotic interactions, dispersal, and stochasticity influence the structure of fish metacommunities in the western Atlantic over different spatial and temporal scales. I first used a community-produced dataset of fish surveys to describe metacommunity structure in the tropical and subtropical western Atlantic across different spatial grains and extents. I then used a long-term monitoring dataset of Florida’s estuarine fishes to investigate spatiotemporal variability in community structure and analyze the processes that influence estuarine community assembly in forage fishes and large-bodied fishes. Across the three studies presented in this dissertation, I showed that the spatial and temporal scales at which metacommunity studies are conducted can have a substantial influence on the ability to resolve the full breadth of processes that influence fish assemblages.
Scholar Commons Citation
Peake, Jonathan A., "Spatiotemporal dynamics of coastal nekton metacommunities in the western Atlantic" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10666
Included in
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons
