Spatial structure of phytoplankton metacommunities and their functional groups in a neotropical floodplain

The spatial and temporal patterns and dynamics of biological community structure can be better understood through the lens of metacommunity theory, in which the effect of local (deterministic processes, ecological niche theory) and regional (stochastic processes, neutral theory) processes are evaluated as the main predictors of phytoplankton. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the effect of local environmental characteristics, spatial, and landscape predictors on the phytoplankton community in lakes of the Araguaia River floodplain. We evaluated the following questions: (i) What is the specific importance of physical and chemical water characteristics (local environmental predictors), dispersive processes (spatial predictors), and land use and occupancy (landscape predictors) in the phytoplankton metacommunity structure, both for taxonomic and functional groups? (ii) Does the buffer size used in land use and land cover measurement around the sampling units show differences in phytoplankton community prediction? All the predictors could explain the phytoplankton structure but the spatial were the most important. The buffers showed different predictive abilities, with taxonomic classification being related to larger sizes of buffers and functional groups the opposite. The great influence of spatial predictors can be explained by source-sink dynamics, where dispersal is so strong that it can diminish the effects of local predictors and guarantee a large flux of organisms to sink communities. In conclusion, dispersive processes have been shown to strongly influence the spatial structuring of the phytoplankton metacommunity and we highlight the need to consider buffers' size when assessing the landscape's effect on phytoplankton communities.