DOI: 10.5061/dryad.s7h44j142
title: Data from: Chiropteran metacommunity structure in the Atlantic Forest of South America

description: Aim Patterns of local species diversity are shaped by dispersal ability,
 and associated metacommunity structure. Here we set out to test the effect
 of dispersal ability on metacommunity structure of bats throughout the
 Atlantic Forest of South America considering differences among
 communities, functional groups and species regarding environmental,
 spatial and connectance-related drivers of
 composition.  In addition, we aimed to illuminate
 phylogenetic and ecological correlates such as incidence (i.e., frequency
 of occurrence across sites) and wing morphology of the degree to which
 species respond to spatial and environmental drivers. Location Atlantic
 Forest of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Taxon Phyllostomid bats Methods
 Distributional data from the Atlantic Bats dataset were compiled for 39
 species at 120 sites.  Variation among bat species was
 partitioned into pure environmental, pure space, pure connectivity, joint
 and unaccounted variation fractions.  Redundancy
 analyses or simple linear regression determined amount of variation in
 variation fractions accounted for by phylogeny or ecological
 characteristics of species. Results The metacommunity of Atlantic Forest
 phyllostomid bats was significantly structured by environmental, space and
 connectivity characteristics.  Animalivore and
 sanguinivore species composition was significantly related only to
 connectivity.  Nectarivore species composition was
 significantly related to pure environmental and pure connectance
 characteristics.  Frugivores exhibited structure that
 was significantly related to all three kinds of characteristics (pure
 environmental, pure spatial and pure connectance), similar to that of the
 overall metacommunity.  Species-specific responses to
 environmental and spatial drivers were highly variable but exhibited
 strong affinities related to phylogeny and functional
 group.  Incidence of species within the metacommunity
 was significantly related to magnitude of the pure environmental variation
 partition.  As the incidence of a species increased,
 variation in distribution and abundance was more related to environmental
 characteristics.  There was no significant relationship
 between dispersal ability as estimated from forearm length and magnitude
 of the connectivity variation partition.  Main Conclusions
 Metacommunity structure of bats in the Atlantic Forest is complex and
 includes variation across multiple scales of ecological
 organization.  Moreover, structure is strongly
 associated with phylogenetic, functional, and distributional
 characteristics of species, with these in turn related to responses to
 spatial and environmental gradients in Atlantic Forest.
description: To estimate metacommunity structure we used the Atlantic Bats
 dataset (Muylaert et al. 2017).  The Atlantic Bats dataset is a compendium
 of 135 quantitative studies on bats from 205 sites; data are available as
 an Ecology data paper (Muylaert et al. 2017).  We selected only those
 communities that were represented by at least 100 individuals (Figure 1)
 to ensure that sites were sufficiently sampled (Stevens 2013).  We imposed
 the additional requirement that only taxa that occurred at 5 or more sites
 were included in analyses.  This reduced stochasticity due to rare species
 as well as facilitated species-specific analyses (see below).  Our
 analyses were based on a 120 site × 39 species matrix.