Parasite metacommunities: evaluating the roles of host community composition and environmental gradients in structuring symbiont communities within amphibians

1. Ecologists increasingly report the structures of metacommunities for free-living species, yet far less is known about the composition of symbiont communities through space and time. Understanding the drivers of symbiont community patterns has implications ranging from emerging infectious disease to managing host microbiomes.
2. Using symbiont communities from amphibian hosts sampled from wetlands of California, USA, we quantified the effects of spatial, habitat filtering, and host community components on symbiont occupancy and overall metacommunity structure.
3. We built upon a statistical method to describe metacommunity structure that accounts for imperfect detection in survey data – detection error-corrected elements of metacommunity structure (DECEMS) – by adding an analysis to identify covariates of community turnover. We applied our model to a metacommunity of 8 parasite taxa observed in 3571 Pacific chorus frogs (Pseudacris regilla) surveyed from 174 wetlands over 5 years.
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