McMurdo Dry Valleys Metacommunity dynamics simulations for diatoms in Antarctic ponds

We use metacommunity simulations to understand how local and regional community assembly dynamics influence the regional biodiversity patterns that we observe in the McMurdo Dry Valleys ecosystem. A metacommunity refers to a network of communities in an ecosystem that are connected to one another by the dispersal of biota among sites. For example, ponds in the McMurdo Dry Valleys share common diatom species that are likely dispersed among neighboring ponds by wind. We have written a metacommunity model for the R programming language (MCSim, Sokol et al. 2015) to explore what biodiversity patterns look like for different metacommunity connectivity scenarios. This gives us the opportunity to model alternative hypotheses and explore how biodiversity metrics, such as beta-diversity, can be expected to respond to changing ecosystem connectivity for different sets of assumptions about the underlying dynamics that could potentially control biodiversity in the Dry Valleys.Â