Data from: A new integrative framework for large-scale assessments of biodiversity and community dynamics, using littoral gastropods and crabs of British Columbia, Canada

Improving our understanding of species responses to environmental changes
is an important contribution ecologists can make to facilitate effective
management decisions. Novel synthetic approaches to assessing biodiversity
and ecosystem integrity are needed, ideally including all species living
in a community and the dynamics defining their ecological relationships.
Here we present and apply an integrative approach that links
high-throughput, multi-character taxonomy with community ecology. The
overall purpose is to enable the coupling of biodiversity assessments with
investigations into the nature of ecological interactions in a
community-level data set. We collected 1,195 gastropods and crabs in
British Columbia. First, the General mixed Yule-coalescent (GMYC) and the
Poisson Tree Processes (PTP) methods for proposing primary
species-hypotheses based on cox1 sequences were evaluated against an
integrative taxonomic framework. We then used data on the geographic
distribution of delineated species to test species co-occurrence patterns
for non-randomness using community-wide and pairwise approaches. Results
showed that PTP generally outperformed GMYC and thus constitutes a more
effective option for producing species-hypotheses in community-level
datasets. Non-random species co-occurrence patterns indicative of
ecological relationships or habitat preferences were observed for grazer
gastropods, whereas assemblages of opportunistic omnivorous gastropods and
crabs appeared influenced by random processes. Species-pair associations
were consistent with current ecological knowledge, thus suggesting that
applying community assembly within a large taxonomical framework
constitutes a valuable tool for assessing ecological interactions.
Combining phylogenetic, morphological and co-occurrence data enabled an
integrated view of communities, providing both a conceptual and pragmatic
framework for biodiversity assessments and investigations into community
dynamics.