DOI: 10.5061/dryad.9fp3g
title: Data from: Season-specific and guild-specific effects of anthropogenic landscape modification on metacommunity structure of tropical bats

description: 1. Fragmentation per se due to human land conversion is a landscape-scale
 phenomenon. Accordingly, assessment of distributional patterns across a
 suite of potentially connected communities (i.e. metacommunity structure)
 is an appropriate approach for understanding the effects of landscape
 modification, and complements the plethora of fragmentation studies that
 have focused on local community structure. To date, metacommunity
 structure within human-modified landscapes has been assessed with regard
 to nestedness along species richness gradients. This is problematic
 because there is little support that species richness gradients are
 associated with the factors moulding species distributions. More
 importantly, many alternative patterns are possible, and different
 patterns may manifest during different seasons and for different guilds
 because of variation in resource availability and resource requirements of
 taxa. 2. We determined the best-fit metacommunity structure of a
 phyllostomid bat assemblage, frugivore ensemble, and gleaning animalivore
 ensemble within a human-modified landscape in the Caribbean lowlands of
 Costa Rica during the dry and wet seasons to elucidate important
 structuring mechanisms. Furthermore, we identified the landscape
 characteristics associated with the latent gradient underlying
 metacommunity structure. 3. We discriminated among multiple metacommunity
 structures by assessing coherence, range turnover, and boundary clumping
 of an ordinated site-by-species matrix. We identified the landscape
 characteristics associated with the latent gradient underlying
 metacommunity structure via hierarchical partitioning. 4. Metacommunity
 structure was never nested nor structured along a richness gradient. 5.
 The phyllostomid assemblage and frugivore ensemble exhibited Gleasonian
 structure (range turnover along a common gradient) during the dry season
 and Clementsian structure (range turnover and shared boundaries along a
 common gradient) during the wet season. Distance between forest patches
 and forest edge density structured the phyllostomid metacommunity during
 the dry and wet seasons, respectively. Proportion of pasture and forest
 patch density structured the frugivore metacommunity during the dry
 season. 6. Gleaning animalivores exhibited chequerboard structure
 (mutually exclusive species-pairs) during the dry season and random
 structure during the wet season. 7. Metacommunity structure was likely
 mediated by differential resource use or interspecific relationships.
 Furthermore, the interaction between landscape characteristics and
 seasonal variation in resources resulted in season-specific and
 guild-specific distributional patterns.
description: Data from:
 Season-specific and guild-specific effects of anthropogenic landscape
 modification on metacommunity structure of tropical batsData file contains
 protocol/methods of data collection, geographic location and general
 description of sampling sites, dates of data collections, and
 site-by-species abundance matrices for the dry season and wet season of
 2010.For_DRYAD_Cisneros_CRbatdata.txt