Randomized trial examines environmental sorting in crustacean zooplankton metacommunities, suggesting functional traits enhance community understanding.
Key Points
This research aims to understand how environmental gradients and regional differences impact crustacean zooplankton metacommunity structure through functional traits.
Applied joint species distribution models to crustacean zooplankton metacommunities in boreal Québec lakes.
Integrated abiotic and non-zooplankton biotic environmental gradients along with functional traits and phylogeny.
Examined three regions with differing landscape features.
Abiotic conditions were identified as the main driver of zooplankton metacommunity structure across all regions.
In the Côte-Nord region, functional traits significantly correlated with species responses to pH and conductivity.
Less dispersal limitation in Côte-Nord facilitated better sorting of species into suitable environmental patches.
Cite This Study
Fortin-Archambault et al. (2026) studied this question.