Data from: Season-specific and guild-specific effects of anthropogenic landscape modification on metacommunity structure of tropical bats

1. Fragmentation per se due to human land conversion is a landscape-scale
phenomenon. Accordingly, assessment of distributional patterns across a
suite of potentially connected communities (i.e. metacommunity structure)
is an appropriate approach for understanding the effects of landscape
modification, and complements the plethora of fragmentation studies that
have focused on local community structure. To date, metacommunity
structure within human-modified landscapes has been assessed with regard
to nestedness along species richness gradients. This is problematic
because there is little support that species richness gradients are
associated with the factors moulding species distributions. More
importantly, many alternative patterns are possible, and different
patterns may manifest during different seasons and for different guilds
because of variation in resource availability and resource requirements of
taxa. 2. We determined the best-fit metacommunity structure of a
phyllostomid bat assemblage, frugivore ensemble, and gleaning animalivore
ensemble within a human-modified landscape in the Caribbean lowlands of
Costa Rica during the dry and wet seasons to elucidate important
structuring mechanisms. Furthermore, we identified the landscape
characteristics associated with the latent gradient underlying
metacommunity structure. 3. We discriminated among multiple metacommunity
structures by assessing coherence, range turnover, and boundary clumping
of an ordinated site-by-species matrix. We identified the landscape
characteristics associated with the latent gradient underlying
metacommunity structure via hierarchical partitioning. 4. Metacommunity
structure was never nested nor structured along a richness gradient. 5.
The phyllostomid assemblage and frugivore ensemble exhibited Gleasonian
structure (range turnover along a common gradient) during the dry season
and Clementsian structure (range turnover and shared boundaries along a
common gradient) during the wet season. Distance between forest patches
and forest edge density structured the phyllostomid metacommunity during
the dry and wet seasons, respectively. Proportion of pasture and forest
patch density structured the frugivore metacommunity during the dry
season. 6. Gleaning animalivores exhibited chequerboard structure
(mutually exclusive species-pairs) during the dry season and random
structure during the wet season. 7. Metacommunity structure was likely
mediated by differential resource use or interspecific relationships.
Furthermore, the interaction between landscape characteristics and
seasonal variation in resources resulted in season-specific and
guild-specific distributional patterns.