Community-level spatiotemporal synchrony: new metric and application to White Sea meiobenthic harpacticoids

Abstract

Synchrony is a multifaceted biological phenomenon exhibited at various levels of organization. Here, we introduce the concept of structural synchrony, defined as the coherence of structural variations in multispecies assemblages occurring at a certain spatiotemporal scale, and propose a direct measure of this type of synchrony. This approach was first tested on numeric simulations imitating various types of model community dynamics and then applied to a large data set on White Sea intertidal harpacticoids, covering a wide range of spatial (decimeters to 140 m) and temporal (days to 25 yr) scales. Scale-specific analysis revealed distinct patterns and allowed us to draw inferences about processes that drive community dynamics. Short-term (up to 1 mo) changes occurred independently or even anti-synchronically, possibly due to trophic-driven migrations. On a seasonal scale, a high degree of within-habitat synchrony occurred at time intervals of 2-3 mo or longer but dropped with increasing spatial distance; this pattern is most likely caused by seasonal reproductive dynamics of populations. At the interannual scale, external exposure, i.e. long-term changes in sediment composition, appeared to be the strongest synchronizing force for the harpacticoid community, while this factor was locally active and became most apparent at the within-habitat scale. We evaluate the advantages and limitations of our framework, highlighting its broad domain of application and anticipating potential extensions. We encourage ecologists to integrate structural synchrony analysis into their toolbox to quantitatively evaluate spatiotemporal community dynamics and to link these dynamics with underlying processes.

Spatiotemporal dynamics of subarctic intertidal macrobenthos: going their own ways

“…No significant trends were observed over the last three decades in ice cover, seasonal courses of water temperature and salinity, or tidal regime (Drozdov and Usov, 2014; Naumov, 2019). Average content of organic carbon in the CB sediments also changed negligibly, indicating the permanent rate of organic input to the beach (Azovsky et al ., 2022b). The sediments are constantly redistributed across the beach by wave and tidal currents, with 10–15 year periods of local siltation or sanding (Burkovsky, 2006; Azovsky et al ., 2022b; see also Figures 2 and S2A).…”

“…Average content of organic carbon in the CB sediments also changed negligibly, indicating the permanent rate of organic input to the beach (Azovsky et al ., 2022b). The sediments are constantly redistributed across the beach by wave and tidal currents, with 10–15 year periods of local siltation or sanding (Burkovsky, 2006; Azovsky et al ., 2022b; see also Figures 2 and S2A). Contrary to our expectations, however, the macrobenthic community features were poorly associated with sediment properties or vertical beach zonation.…”

“…Spatial synchrony, i.e. the concordance of fluctuations among spatially distinct local populations of a species, has been detected in many animal and plant taxa (Azovsky et al ., 2022b, and references therein). To test this type of synchrony, we used data on several common species from the three sites.…”

“…These processes are often site-specific, proceed nonsynchronously, and thus cannot be extrapolated to larger spatial scales (Fromentin et al ., 1997; Arribas et al ., 2019; Azovsky and Kokarev, 2019). In particular, most authors agree that small-scale variability is a general property of marine benthic assemblages, and site-specific processes prevail in determining their dynamics (Hewitt and Thrush, 2009; Gerwing et al ., 2016; Arribas et al ., 2019; Azovsky et al ., 2022b, 2023). The relative importance of these multiple drivers acting in different scales is a fundamental question of ecological research, but disentangling their effects is a challenging task requiring long-term studies in multiple loci (Hewitt and Thrush, 2009; Soltwedel et al ., 2016; Azovsky, 2019).…”

Monitoring Bioindication of Plankton through the Analysis of the Fourier Spectra of the Underwater Digital Holographic Sensor Data

“…and biological origin (shoals of predators). In fact, this refers to those marine manifestations that are described in works [43][44][45] as submezoscale. It is generally accepted that due to their small spatial scale, the role of such structures in the distribution of zooplankton is quite difficult to identify in situ.…”