Data from: Dispersal limitations and long-term persistence drive differentiation from haplotypes to communities within a tropical sky-island: evidence from community metabarcoding

Neutral theory proposes that dispersal stochasticity is one of the main
drivers of local diversity. Haplotypes-level genetic variation can now be
efficiently sampled from across whole communities, thus making it possible
to test neutral predictions from the genetic to species-level diversity,
and higher. However, empirical data is still limited, with the few studies
to date coming from temperate latitudes. Here, we focus on a tropical
mountain within the Transmexican Volcanic Belt to evaluate spatially
fine-scale patterns of arthropod community assembly to understand the role
of dispersal limitation and landscape features as drivers of diversity. We
sampled whole-communities of arthropods for eight orders at a spatial
scale ranging from 50 m to 19 km, using whole community metabarcoding. We
explored multiple hierarchical levels, from individual haplotypes to
lineages at 0.5, 1.5, 3, 5, 7.5% similarity thresholds, to evaluate
patterns of richness, turnover, and distance decay of similarity with
isolation-by-distance and isolation-by-resistance (costs to dispersal
given by landscape features) approaches. Our results showed that distance
and altitude influence distance decay of similarity at all hierarchical
levels. This holds for arthropod groups of contrasting dispersal
abilities, but with different strength depending on the spatial scale. Our
results support a model where local-scale differentiation mediated by
dispersal constraints, combined with long-term persistence of lineages, is
an important driver of diversity within tropical sky islands.