Effects of compositional heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation on richness and diversity in simulated landscapes

Landscape structure plays a key role in mediating a variety of ecological processes affecting biodiversity patterns, however, its precise effects and the mechanisms underpinning them remain unclear. While the effects of landscape structure have been extensively investigated both empirically, and theoretically from a metapopulation perspective, the effects of spatial structure at the landscape scale remain poorly explored from a metacommunity perspective. Here, we attempt to address this gap using a spatially explicit, individual-based metacommunity model to explore the effects of landscape compositional heterogeneity and per se spatial configuration on diversity at the landscape and patch level via their influence on long-term community assembly processes. Our model simulates communities composed of lineages of annual, asexual organisms living, reproducing, dispersing, and competing within grid-based, fractal landscapes which vary in their magnitude of spatial environmental heterogeneit..., This dataset contains the results of a simulation experiment using an individual-based metacommunity simulation model. This dataset contains output from simulation scenarios covering different combinations of compositional heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation parameters. Data files for each scenario contain combined data from 30 replicate runs of the simulation. Data files contain data over time for various landscape aggregated statistics (ending in _trend), data on individual organisms at the final timestep of the simulation, and patch aggregated data calculated from data on individual organisms for the final timestep of the simulation (ending in _patches). This archive additionally contains the parameter files used for the different scenarios, the shell scripts used to run the scenarios, and a PDF user guide describing the use of the simulation program and its output data as well as the R script used to analyse the data and produce figures., , # Effects of compositional heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation on richness and diversity in simulated landscapes

---

This dataset contains the results of a simulation experiment using an individual-based metacommunity simulation model. This dataset contains output from simulation scenarios covering 16 different combinations of compositional heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation parameters. This archive additionally contains the parameter files used for the different scenarios, the shell scripts used to run the scenarios, a PDF user guide describing the use of the simulation program and its output data, and the R script used to create the figures in the journal article associated with this repository.

## Description of the data and file structure

Data files consist of .txt files containing comma-separated values and can be opened directly via a text editor or imported into any data analysis software capable of importing text or CSV files. Data files for each scenario contai...